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Intel's Core 2 Desktop Processors Tested
Steve Kerrison writes "It's early morning here in the UK, but that doesn't stop us from being around to see the launch of Conroe and friends, Intel's newest desktop chips. Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests. Now that's bound to get the fanboy blood pumping, right? We've also taken a look at a pre-built system that's powered by the Extreme X6800 CPU, along with an nForce 4 SLI chipset. As you'd expect, it's quick."
Gotta wonder if intel can legitimately deliver at this price or if they are going with loss leader tactics to try and regain marketshare.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
so when will the first PC's come out with these?
There's a much more detailed review up at HotHardware.com
will this be enough to run Vista?
"Real World" testing of the new core2 duo's over at HardOCP seems to suggest that the hype is, well, Bullshot (Penny Arcade). He also savages... no, investigates, the other benchmarks with his normal subtle-but-robust manner :)
It seems that the top of the line Core2Duo just barely beats an FX-62 numerically in actual game performance; statistically there is no difference whatsoever...
As with all things, it comes down to perspective. I have no doubt that Intel are catching up to AMD, may indeed have caught up. However, I simply do not believe they have gone from lagging significantly to leading significantly at the same clock speed; Time, I suppose, will tell.
We have a comprehensive review on OCAU also: http://www.overclockers.com.au/article.php?id=4895 87
We compare the new high-end 2.93GHz X6800 and the 2.67GHz E6700, with the current Pentium D 955XE and AMD's A64 FX-62. Lots of info, loads of benchmarks and of course, some overclocking.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1989036 ,00.asp
this might very well be an interesting article but if they're going to submit me to atleast five flash ads on screen at the same time, this early in the morning, I think I'll pass.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology.
..but it seems I need to upgrade to this new Intel processor so that my computer can handle all the ads in the website.
Even if it's just a shot at getting market share back, the fact that great things like this are being sold at lower prices only mean good things for the consumer. This, for example, is GREAT for me as a system builder because everything besides the Pentium D 805 was expensive. Now, with something like this, I can offer a (possibly) better CPU for not that much more.
More good stuff is coming from both camps, I predict.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I think the competition has been good, but if Intel returns wearing the performance crown then I think there is a real potential that the CPU market will be dominated by Intel more so than it has ever been before, with consoles being the main holdout. If these benchmarks are true, then the introduction of the Core Duo will be a real turning point I think. Keep in mind that these speeds are introductory and that in the past Intel hasn't had much trouble progressing to higher performance out of the same architecture.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
What the benchmarks mean is that if you do a lot of media encoding, compiling, etc, you would probably benefit from conroe. HOWEVER, if you play games, regardless of whether or not you are on an AMD/INTEL system currently--if your system is pretty new--Do not upgrade at this time, as you are GPU limited, not CPU limited. Basically conroe: Large performance gains in cpu bound applications Little performance gain in gpu bound applications, obviously. This is good for intel. My systems for the past 7 years or so have been AMD. My next one very well may not be. The good news for everyone is that AMD is now the underdog again. Remember what happened last time they were the underdog? We got the athlon. The cpu speed wars went into a frenzy. For the last several years (5 or so) Intel has been sucking balls. Their chips have not been performance competitive. Clock speeds in both camps have stagnated. AMD chip prices have went way up compared to how they used to be. This is good news, AMD will go into overdrive developing their next-gen chips. Amd chips will become dirt cheap again. We'll see a new performance war. This is something i've been waiting for anxiously for a few years. I am very excited. Another thing is that the new intel chips take much less power than the old ones . (thank god)
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
(cribbed from my post in anothe rplace).HardOCP are complete AMD whores here.
They do the power tests with power saving settings turned off. This gives AMD the edge at idle, mostly due to a lower transistor count. As other sites have shown, turning the power saving settings on (as one would expect) puts Intel far out front at idle.
How do they end that article?
" I would highly suggest keeping your eyes on AMD low wattage / energy efficient processors for those projects that require a noiseless solution."
So they make Intel look worse than they are, and yet Intel still wins at under load. What's the takeaway? Buy AMD.
In the gaming, after the Intel gets done smoking the FX-62, what do they say?
"It is very interesting that in all of our testing, both "what is playable" testing and "apples-to-apples" testing, the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 are very close in performance. In fact, in some games they are dead even. The price difference between the two is very extreme with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 costing $999 and the Core 2 Duo E6700 at $530. Does it look like the price is justified between the two for gaming? We can safely say "no" as far as gaming goes with this gameplay testing we have performed."
Then, when speaking of AMD, do they mention even the E6700 ($530) beat the FX-62 and the FX-62 costs over $800? Nope.
"As for the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62, all of our testing shows that it does trail the two new Intel CPUs in gameplay performance. So, if you wanted to point one out as being a "winner" then for sure it is the new Intel Core 2 X6800 and E6700. But, if you look at the amount of difference between the AMD and Intel CPUs, you will see that it isn't enough to amount to anything. The only game that we saw any real-world difference in was Oblivion, and even that was tiny. A little overclocking would clear that difference up."
Any mention of overclocking levels and how the Core 2 Duo overclocks well? Much better than an FX-62 usually. Nope.
What's their takeaway from the gaming section where a $530 Intel beats out AMD's fastest chip (at $800)?
"We have proven here that the flurry of canned benchmarks based on timedemos showing huge gains with Core 2 processors are virtually worthless in rating the true gaming performance of these processors today. The fact of the matter is that real-world gaming performance today greatly lies at the feet of your video card. Almost none of today's games are performance limited by your CPU. Maybe that will change, but given the trends, it is not likely."
and then
"Lastly, I would advise everyone that is thinking of rushing out and purchasing their latest upgrade that we are sure to see HUGE pricing slashes out of AMD before the end of the month."
Way to go HardOCP. Rig your tests, ignore Intel victories and make your summary "buy AMD".
You have zero cerdibility, HardOCP.
Also, you used bullshot wrong. Bullshot is a term for fake screenshots designed for games (like EA uses). It doesn't fit here.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Everything else aside, that was the one thing that interested me the most about the review - the fact that the new conroes are allegedly going to be consuming about half as much power as current desktop chips. Why is this important? Well, if such gains can be made on the desktop, I'm _really_ looking forward to the laptop chips. Maybe the 7hrs claimed battery life by laptop manufacturers will actually be accurate in the near future.
Even though the benchmarks show that the intel conroe beats the amd fx, the real question still remains, the value. Would you honestly notice a difference in fps when both processors were running relatively close in frames per second. Maybe the conroe can get 20 more fps per second, but is that worth the extra money. Amd is notorious for being less expensive then Intel. Either way you could run the top of the line games, its just a question of which allows you to get more bang for your buck. If Amd sets a signifigantly competitive price, then it really doesn't matter how well the processors perform, people will choose whichever one provides the most performance per dollar value. While the Conroe beats the Fx in the performance battle, it still has not yet won the war. Let the price battle begin.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Most likley they are just having good yeilds. They've pretty much got the kinks worked out of their 65nm process with the Pentium Ds they made on it so it wouldn't supprise me that Core 2s are having high yeilds. High yeilds = low cost per unit. This is espically true if the yeilds are high, but mostly at lower speeds. Say 90% of chips work, but of that 90% 50% only work at the slowest speed. Well, just knock the price down on that and get it back in volume, hike it up more on the rarer fast chips.
If you look at their current pricing, it's not real supprising. You find you can get a Pentium D 65nm for as little as $175. That gets you a 3GHz one on their old 90nm technology. The price creaps up on the first incriment, a 3.2 is $217. However it takes a sizable jump then to $317 for 3.4GHz. The 3.6GHZ, if you can find it, is $500 or so. Past that, well there's only the "extreme" edition and that's over $1000 for 3.73GHz.
The jumps like that are normal. They can easily produce low speed chips and there's a large market for them so they are cheap. Maybe a couple incremental upgrades. Then you hit a knee and prices start jumping fast.
Based on their current pricing for their current high end, I don't see anything out of the oridinary for this new pricing.
The processor is generally the thing I upgrade the least because it simply has the least increase in demands. Video cards you can upgrade once a year and not be doing it too often given the advances they have. Throwing lots of RAM at your system is also a good idea. Processor? Well for gaming and most apps it just really isn't that big a deal. Get a good dual core of prett much any design you like and call it good. Hell if all you are worried about id gaming and not doing things in the background while you game get a good single core, games still don't make any use of a second core to speak of.
I moved from a P4 2.4GHz to a Pentium D 2.8GHz when I did a system overhaul not too long ago. Why such a minor processor upgrade, you might wonder? Well because the processor wasn't the issue. That 2.4 was plenty fast, for games at least. The graphics card was the issue and I wanted PCIe which my board didn't support. Had the board had the same socket, I would have just kept the processor. It was fine (though because of teh audio work I do I'm appreciating the dual core). I just got a dual core because they weren't that much more expensive and it has geek appeal to me.
The real useful thing, in my book, is that the Core 2s run cooler. Current processors have tended towards too hot. AMD is much better than Intel but even they put out quite a bit of heat at the high end. It sounds like the Core 2s are quite efficient for the performance they give. That's good because I value a quiet system and frankly, it's as good as I'm willing to make it at this point cooling wise. I'm not going water cooling and there's just no more air cooling I can do short of making the fans speed up.
I don't think I'd recommend these as an upgrade to anyone who already has a dual core AMD or Intel system. Unless you are doing simulations or rendering or something I just can't see the minor increase as worth it. Certianly not for games. However if you need to upgrade anyhow, these look like winners.
The headline states that "Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests" but if you read the article, the $182 Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.83 GHz) chip wasn't tested. All of the performance data relates to the $224 Core 2 Duo E6400 and pricier chips. The results are impressive, but I think the "$180 chip beats Athlon FX-62" deception should be pointed out to anyone who didn't pick that detail up from RTFA.
Rick Brewster of Paint.NET fame tested two Core 2 CPUs with his own benchmark.
I wonder if we will ever see a Core Pentio?
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Its interesting that all benchmarks seem to include mp3 compression or mpeg video creation etc. How many slashdot users actually use their computers more than 1-5% of the time doing that type of stuff? Of course Its all those DiVX groups that need the performance so that they can encode and release an extra 20% more videos in a month ;)
Overall the performance of the latest bunch of Intel processors is great, but when it comes down to it in a datacentre environment where spare stock etc is a costly exercise using Intel products is going to cost you more in the long run, while if we go with Opteron we can save on spares and still get great performance/power consumption.
TDP of Core 2 Duo E6400: 65W
TDP of Athlon FX-64: 125W
Whoops!
Probably a year or two before Vista ships.
List kep up to date of Core 2 Reviews so far including 16 articles, with more to follow.
thats it...you're fucking banned from using parenthesis :P
now goto your room
The Conroe was released to be in competition with AMD's future offerings, it is intended to be the final product. AMD released the FX62 to be in a pissing contest with Intel, but Intel has just pissed way further than AMD can reach with the FX62, putting them behind again, and upsetting the 'stupid' people who rushed out to change to an AMD system just because AMD was statistically better.
Personally, I don't care about processors costing USD 400 or gaming performance, where CPU doesn't matter too much anyway. Are there any comparisons of the cheapest Core 2 processors with similarly priced AMDs?
Has anyone noticed the processor is not yet available for sale and won't be available for a while? - I was very impressed by the benchmarks until I tried to find it for sale and saw that expected street prices will be far higher than those listed in the review sites and in fact will rival AMD prices.
- Google earth
- Windows Vista
- Sun Java
- Flash (Hell my athlon 64 chokes on some some flash content)
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe premiere
- h264 decoders/encoders
- XGL compiz
... I'm sure you can come up with plenty of other examples.Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
So my question is [...] is who the hell is bothering to rate their processors by what REALLY counts? By this I mean MIPS [...] as opposed to GHz?
This figure is meaningless in modern CPUs as processors perform a variable number of instructions per cycle depending on (a) what instruction (b) whether data is in cache (c) whether there are pipeline stalls to account for. The best you can hope for is the number of cycles of some standardised performance test that are executed in a specific time, which is what articles like this one provide.
I've got to wonder if you read the article, 'cause if you did, you'd know that these processors run at a slower clock rate than existing ones, so you really wouldn't be accusing anyone of comparing GHz.
Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests
But, wait! YOU didn't wait for the next Athlon FX-63 processor that totally smashes that $180 Intel one!
It's coming out in a few minutes...
But wait again! A NEW $175 Intel next generation processor is on the verge of completion, and will be released soon after the Athlon FX-63 to totally obliterate that one!
It's coming out at the close of business today.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Merom and Yonah are basically dual-core Pentium M chips - 3 instruction decoders, 3-wide instruction issue / retire. They include the Pentium M's instructional units, including 2 64-bit SSE units per core.
Conroe and Woodcrest are complete redesigns of the Pentium M architecture, and are 4 + 1 decode, 4-wide issue and retire. Intel completely revamped the execution units: they include additional execution ports, and more floating-point power (ncluding full 128-bit wide SSE processing paths).
While they are both of the same pedigree (P6 -> Pentium M), they are NOT AT ALL the same. One is designed for efficiency, and the other tosses some efficiency out the window in favor of increased performance. See the preview article here at Real World Technologies.
You are thinking of the AMD Athlon / Opteron / Turion, which are the exact same chip with different microcode paths enabled. These chips can most certainly be taken from the same wafer.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Merom is from the same microarchitecture as Conroe and Woodcrest.
You are correct about Yonah though.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My MythTV box spends MOST Of its time doing exactly that. If these chips are as fast/cheap/cool (and therefore QUIET) as they appear to be, my MythTV box will be running Conroe by the end of the year.
The basic fact is that "hardware enthusiasts" are neither good writers nor are they all that technically knowledgeable. Their saving grace is that they are willing to spend days on the drudgery of benchmarking. We are willing to forgive their artistic pretensions in exchange for a valuable service. You just have to read the reviews with your BS filter on.
It is true that this is not the first time that Intel has focused on IPC, that integrated memory controllers are not evil, and that few people fully understand the detailed workings of SSE (definitely not me). These are all instances of marketing BS. But they don't really mean anything. The benchmarks show that the Core architecture has much better IPC than the P4, regardless of whether this is due to the extra pipeline, shorter pipelines, better cache, lower memory latency, etc. And the benchmarks also show that the Core has better memory latency than P4 despite the external memory controller. And lastly Intel has drastically improved the floating point performance of the Core processor over its predecessor, the Pentium M, thanks to improvements in the SSE unit, whatever those improvements may be.
This is always going to happen when a journalistic organ is supported by sponsors from the industry it covers. The editors are obligated to include a bunch of marketing BS. You can get valuable information from these compromised sources, but you have to read between the lines.