Intel's Conroe Resurfaces, Benchmarks Strong

MojoKid writes "Intel has been occasionally leaking performance results of their upcoming Core 2 Duo processor for the desktop, code named Conroe. At this years IDF select members of the press were allowed to get hands-on access to test systems for benchmarking. Now, coincident with this week's Computex show in Taiwan, Intel has seen fit to show us just what their soon to be released CPU can do, yet again. Select press members got together with Intel in New York city for another round of testing with Conroe. HotHardware has a performance showcase posted with scores from a Core 2 Duo E6700 machine and a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition X6800. The results, compared against the backdrop of an overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 system, look very impressive indeed for Intel."

Comments

On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[Visaris]

These benchmarks were run on boxes that Intel built. Even the AMD box was built and configured by Intel. Trusting these benchmarks is abit like trusting a study funded by the oil industry claiming that global warming isn't real. There have been a good number of independant tests of the Conroe and these put the top of the line Conroe around 12% faster on average than a FX-62. The results from the Intel benchmarks show a much bigger performance delta, and to be quite honest, I don't trust them one bit. Somewhere around 15% is much more reasonable.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[TheRaven64]

One big difference likely came from the RAM. The AMD box had DDR400, while the Intel box had DDR2-800. DDR2 has a greater latency in terms of cycles than DDR, but when the DDR2 is twice the speed of the DDR then this disappears in absolute terms and you are left with the RAM in the Intel box having about the same latency, but twice the throughput.

Having said that, all of the benchmarks run were publicly available. There's nothing stopping you from configuring an AMD box yourself and seeing what numbers you get. In fact, I'm slightly surprised that the review site didn't do this.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

DDR2-800 is not generally available to the retail world.

http://www.pricewatch.com/memory/845489-1.htm

If Intel really wanted a benchmark they should ask AMD for engineering samples of next year's cores and they could pit them together.

ring...ring...ring...
AMD: Hello?
Intel: Hello, AMD?
AMD: Yes?
Intel: Intel here. We've had to cut back on our industrial espionage budget this year, seems we've had an unexpected revenue shortfall and can't afford that group any more
AMD: Have you considered outsourcing it to India?
Intel: Well, no, not really. We were hoping you could just send us some samples of your lab prototypes.
AMD: Sure, sure, say no more. We'll send those over right away via courier. You'll have them on your desk first thing in the morning.

Somehow, I just don't see that happening...

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[kscguru]

Is widely known to be hardly faster and significantly less mature/stable

Funny that I've been watching AM2 carefully for the past month, and only agree on "less mature". AM2 is not faster by itself, but it does open the door to DDR2 memory. Which means Intel went out of their way to compare an AMD on DDR memory with an Intel chip on DDR2, when Intel could very easily have set up the "equivalent" AMD system on DDR2. When they deliberately don't match memory technologies, I'm suddenly very suspicious of Intel's benchmark.

My socket-AM2 system has been stable - except for Tomb Raider, which does seem buggy (and I'm blaming graphics drivers for that). nForce4 is a buggy chipset period, I don't see how that is any advantage at all.

I expect Intel to jump ahead with their Core design, and then AMD to make up much of the difference with K8L later this year. But on the server side, AMD is going to eat Intel's lunch for a long while yet.

Core 2 Extreme

[mfh]

You have a point about the Intel thing, there. Just like the response time on a monitor -- if the benchmarks come from the manufacturer, how valid can they truly be? Where are the stips?

Point is -- Core 2 Extreme has great specs but the map and the landscape are wholly different. Time will tell.

Re:Core 2 Extreme

[cnettel]

The difference is that there is no trivial way for an end-user to dispute those performance numbers. It's even out of reach for several hardware sites (and there are real differences between different production sets of the same panel). Compare this to CPU performance: ANYONE will be able to run these benchmarks in two months. Anyone can run them today on the AMD and NetBurst side to get reference data. If the Intel results differ a lot at actual release, hell will break loose and Intel would be really out of touch to think that they can succeed. Mainstream users won't care anyway, and the technical users would certainly disprove of the methods.

So, Intel could do this, but they are probably quite aware of the consequences.

Osborne Effect

[Visaris]

Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts. This has forced Intel to drop the prices of netburst (read: P4) parts through the floor to keep moving them. Intel is selling many parts at a loss, and they have more price cuts (up to 60%) planned for the 23rd of July. Conroe is a great chip, but it currently has bad yeilds and will not make up a significant portion of Intel's shipped CPUs until the end of this year. At that point, Conroe based chips will be 20% of production; you can only imagine how many will be available on launch, a whole 6 months earlier than that. Intel has a killer chip on their hands, but it will be along time before Intel is able to ship enough of these to do much to the market. In the mean time, Intel will continue to sell their old tech at a loss to clear out inventory and try to keep AMD from making more marketshare gains... I don't think it is going to work.

Re:Osborne Effect

[zakath]

Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts.

I don't think Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. People don't want their current products because the competition has a better offering. The only option Intel really has is to hype future products because it has become common knowledge that their current line up can't compete with AMD. The hype you're hearing is more of an effort to stop the exodus to AMD, it's yet to be seen if that will work.

Intel is selling many parts at a loss

...and you know this how? Are you privy to the details of Intel's cost/unit? Yes, they've cut prices but they may have had plenty of room to do so and still make money.

Do Intel choose which benchmarks are run?

[edxwelch]

With the previous Conroe benchmarks, Intel specified which benchmarks could be run. I wonder if this is also the case in this review, because noticable absent is the SYSmark benchmarks.
It is standard practice in biased tests to only include the benchmark where your product does well.

I'm just waiting for Sharikou, Ph. D to show up.

[MSFanBoi2]

Soon this clown will show up spouting all his anti-Intel pro-AMD rhetoric.

He makes the worst of the Mac, Linux or Microsoft fanboi's look a touch out of the ordinary.

Both the Woodcrest and Conroe have shown time and time again in INDEPENDENT testing, to be quite a bit faster than any of AMD's options. I've been testing a Dell 2950 with Woodcrest and it simply smokes the HP DL385 dual core setups time and time again in both SQL 2005 (mixed size transactions) and anything else I throw at it, most of the time by 30-40% real world numbers. Other testers have seen much the same.

Intel just pulled a Microsoft. Microsoft was caught napping by Netscape. Intel was caught napping by AMD. It won't happen again.

For All You Nay-Sayers...

[vostok4]

Everyone here is constantly saying "Oh its an Intel system, built by an Intel team, vs. an AMD system, built by an Intel team... I'll trust the reviews when independant people get them."

If you looked a little you would see, that there are already lots of people with the Conroe in their hands. And it has shattered every PI, 3DMark, world record there is. We are talking about 10s 1M SuperPi runs, and if you know anything about that benchmark you will know that is absolutely crazy. Why not read some forums, like XtremeSystems or more specifically some benchmarking threads where the world record was broken on air w/ Conroe, but now its under LN2 for some other people (including coolaler) and is holding the world record.