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Intel's Penryn Benchmarked
Steve Kerrison writes "Intel's keen to show off its up-coming 45nm Penryn Core 2 CPU. HEXUS had some hands on time with the new processor to get an idea of how well it will perform once its released: 'Intel's new 45nm Penryn core adds more than just a clock and FSB hike, so much so that even a dual-core Penryn is able to beat out a quad-core QX6800 under certain circumstances.'"
But the combination of trying to find how to easily get to the real article while also fighting "Intellitext" ads proved too much for me. I am a weak weak man.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
If your app benefits from SSE4 optimizations, the gains compared to the current Core 2 can be giganormous (DivX encoder: +85% at equal clock). Otherwise, expect a per clock advantage of about 10%.
I wonder what under certain circumstances, means because I couldn't gather it from the article. Also, they simply looked at some systems pre-configured by Intel. Not great.
I know this comment is of no intrinsic value to /. But bloody hell those things bloody piss me right off!
With this article it was almost like that "don't touch the wire" game - slowly edging the mouse down through the minefield of text bombs ready to go off in your face at the slightest hint of mousage.
ARRGGHH!!!
arent most app developers still working their way into SSE3? (for instance, mplayer only mentions sse2 in configuration and initialization, and from what i remember even macos intel doesnt fully utilize sse3)
what's the point of even trying for SSE3 or even SSE4 when theyll just plunk down SSE5 within the next 6 months..
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According to Wikipedia, Penryn is intended as a laptop processor.
Does it seem odd to anyone else for Intel to launch a new instruction set on a laptop CPU? Are portables that dominant these days?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I feel bad for AMD, it seems like they're really taking a thrashing this round. This surge in processor technology is just the kind of thing I like to see though. Now to actually harness all that power...
They finally applied some common sense, and are actually pursuing their performance per watt optimization path.
by engineering their chips for portables first, this means they can integrate the same chips into desktops and have the same kind of power conservation from desktop units.
additionally, by investing their r&d straight into laptop chips they dont end up having to spend extra later to re-engineer the chip for portables.
IMHO this is the first smart move from a lumbering corporate giant i've seen since toyota shipped compacts to the us in the mid 70's.
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The Penryn core is just the first. Wait for the Teller core to come out. It's slight of hand techniques tricks you into thinking it has actually out performed other chips.
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
... and so is Hexus Webserver, apparently.
www.anandtech.com has a presumably very similar review (since these are lists of benchmarks which the journalists observed being run by Intel on Intel-provided systems), and enough bandwidth that you can actually get through to it.
It's a little annoying that these chips require different voltage regulators from the ones on current motherboards, since the chipsets are the same and changing the motherboard adds £80, some hours of fuss and an inordinate number of screws to what should be a trivial CPU upgrade, whilst bare motherboards, and even motherboard+CPU pairs, don't seem to sell well on ebay.
good catch there.. brainfart.. i meant "cache"
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i thought the core duo was first for the laptop, and then was adapted into the core 2 duo for desktop (and then circled back around into the laptop again...)
yes? no?
The technologies are staggered between the two companies. So every other year the other company leaps ahead. It's not that AMD is behind, it's that their last release is behind intel's new release. The same thing happened to intel when AMD leaped ahead..
I'm just thankful AMD can compete. If they were still making crappy intel clones, we'd be paying quite a bit more for hardware.
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Core Duo was based on the Pentium M, which was a notebook chip. Things went from there.
We had a power issue overnight (UK time) which seems to be leading to a few further problems for us. I might add, though, that an article of ours was posted on Slashdot only two days ago, with no ill effects whatsoever.
no ill effects? that thing gave me a rash! ; )
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Of course this new processor won't help you read faster, think faster or type faster; and e-mail, web browsing, word processing and slashdot posting have been constrained by human fingers and brains rather than by inadequate computation since the Pentium. If you're using gnome, put a System Monitor and a Frequency Monitor in your panel and see just how rare it is that the Frequency increases above bare-minimum or the load average bar leaves the very bottom of the window.
You can already open, on a five-year-old computer if you want to use current Firefox and a ten-year-old one if you're OK with Internet Explorer 3, windows enough that your short-term memory and your screen space is the limiting factor.
Faster computers mean that you can write experimental code which runs in acceptable time while concentrating on the problem domain rather than on optimisation. They enable silly hobbies - I factorise 130-digit numbers in my idle cycles, each one takes a week on a Core2Duo while in 1997 they took six months of work on a distributed system followed by three days on a Cray.
The real question is... Will it blend?
All we need now is software that will take advantage of all these cores.
It's faster, yes. But I can't wait to see how much less power it uses. The main benefit I see from Intel moving to 45-nm should be getting speeds => Core2 but using less power. As everyone continues on the path to 'greener' tech, this will be one of the biggest selling factors for the Penryn family.
o c.aspx?i=2963&p=2).
And let's not forget that when this comes out in '08, the Core2's will get even cheaper! Heck I'm still excited about the next price drop for the Core2's this 22nd (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showd
There's a few reason to have desktops:
1. Large monitors
2. Large diskspace
3. Better graphics cards
4. You want to tinker with it, upgrade etc.
1. You can do this if you have a laptop or not.
2. External drives, and 200gb internals, allow laptops to equal desktops
3. Some laptops allow you to swap, there are many good laptops with high end video ability
4. ok, you got me, but you don't have the majority of buyers and I think thats why laptops and semi-laptops will pull away with the market
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology is supposed to be for the Santa Rosa platform, but I'm having trouble thinking that they would limit it to just a mobile platform? Would desktops not benefit from this? Intel only mentions its for mobile core 2 processors.. although the Dynamic Acceleration is present in all the chips now, just not as "enhanced".
I'll be ambitious and suggest that Intel may release a tuned math library with SSE4 support (MKL) as well as a revamped Intel compiler.
So if you happen to use those (which many number-crunching users do), you'll be in good shape when they appear.
Well, I RTFA, and it was pointless. FTFA: "and we're absolutely adamant that the benchmarks were chosen to show the two Penryn-based CPUs off in the best possible light." -and- "Further, it's not an apple-to-apple comparison as both 45nm processors were clocked in at 3.33GHz and the QX6800 at 2.93GHz. Our requests for clock and FSB parity were politely ignored. " ...I appreciate the disclosure that it was in fact ruled by Intel and your requests were ignored, but with that, why did you do it then? If the whole thing is skewed by the manufacturer, you've just become part of their advertising campaign.
Intel set it up, they weren't gonna set themselves up to fail. Besides, isn't benchmarking supposed to at least resemble a scientific-like process? If you were going to benchmark you're own machines for whatever reason, would you set it up like this?
Well, the article pointed out that TDP (typical dissipation power, or something like that) ratings are likely to remain the same. They paraphrase Intel as saying they used the reduction in process size to pack in my transistors instead of pursue the power-savings route.
Where's the multi-page version you insensitive clod?
I Kept searching for a multi-page option but I couldn't find one. After years of being conditioned to read articles over 12 pages or so, this layout just freaks me out. I couldn't find the combobox that let me jump to the conclusion. The page seemed way too long and daunting for me to process. And I kept expecting next links that never came!
Take me back to the good old days where you could read a 12 page article and actually feel like you accomplished something.
And even better, if they made a Penryn dual-core that performed the same as a Core2 E6300, it MIGHT scale to an even lower TDP. Again, my point is that the move to 45-nm benefits greatly from being able to perform the same as an older Core2 dual-core (not a Quad-core), but have a lower TDP.
-Same Speed
-Lower TDP
-Profit!
After a bit of investigation, I found that it is possible to do somewhat like bank switching (AWE), again, a weird thing like back in time the EMMS and XMMS bank switched memory. It could be useful for spare/temporal data, but out of the scope of the compile, i.e., via explicit memory handling.
I'll raise you my two penn'orth: Would sir like a (48-bit, I think) flat memory model in the AMD64 architecture?
is the comment
The real question is, we suppose, how well will AMD's Barcelona perform in comparison. We now know Penryn's potential, but AMD keeps us guessing.
Despite the fact that Barcelona is supposed to be shipping at the end of Q2 and Penryn is not due until Q4, Intel seems to be showing stable, polished systems running their 45nm product whereas AMD seems to be holding back early Barcelona silicon.
WHY IS THIS?
Well AMD has already solved that problem, AMD's DSDC is not designed for using 2 cpu's at once. The DSDC is designed for connecting RAM and other system resources as closely to the CPU without any latency. With amd's setup the ram connects through the DSDC, plus amd is shortening the distance between cpu's on DSDC for decreased latency. Oh an AMD is expecting 12.4GBps bandwidth for System Memory. If you want data Access go amd. You dont have SSE4, but you really dont have any apps that have SSE4 use, by the time its out AMD will prolly have SSE4 or something on the lines of that. AMD also has their Shared L3 cache between all cores, then you dont have to transfer information between cores on some other off cpu Controller. Memory Access speed = AMD, CPU clock speed = Intel. The Clock speed is only 10-15% for the penryn, the rest is Memory Access which AMD focused heavily on. If the major player in the New cpu speed is memory access AMD FTW
- Put in 4x1GB sticks for about $300.
Running Linux, this means you can cache all ofThe wet dream of inexpensive, high-density RAM is now a reality. But none of us suspected that the limiting factor in improving desktop performance would be, of all things, finding an inexpensive desktop motherboard that takes 8x DIMMs.