Slashdot Mirror
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.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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
..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."
What?
-William Brendel
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.
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.
WWDC is August 7th.
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
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?
- 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.
Unbelievable.
Here's the answer the GP was probably looking for (from Anandtech's conclusion):
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
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.
I agree with you. Way back when, in my first years in college (mid 80s), I had an Atari 130XE. A math teacher asked me if I had a PC, and I said "Yes." I was very annoyed when she berated me in front of the class, explaining that a PC meant "IBM PC".
So I stoop up and I asked "So you don't think a computer for personal use is a personal computer? So what should I call it? An egg timer?", and thankfully got a lot of chuckles from the other nerds in the class.
So she explained that PCs were used for things like word processing and spreadsheets. "I have a word processor and a spreadsheet."
She was like "oh, I didn't you could get those on an Atari."
I loved my Atari (in a strictly platonic way, of course).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.