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.'"

Comments

I really wanted to read that....

[Churla]

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.

Re:I really wanted to read that....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just the infuriating ads... look at the frigging article content.

It's utterly clueless. The interpretations are irresponsible guesswork, and often go flat out wrong. Wish I had the time right now to list the major factual errors there -- fortunately they outright glare at any (even remotely informed) reader. Outside the mistakes, this "review" boils down to just a mix of buzzword bingo and PR handout paraphrasing, the most gaping holes in the author's compherehension carpeted over with tiring "hip and cool" style (when the author has nothing even seemingly informative to say).

The related Hexus article about Penryn's and Nehalem's new features is even more horrible crapola.

Haven't visited Hexus in a while. This piece was alarming, if representative of their standard nowadays.

Always Suspicious of These

[segedunum]

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.

Re:Always Suspicious of These

[plasmacutter]

this reminds me of the core2 duo upgrade to the macbook (and MBP) lines claiming leaps and bounds greater performance from the cpu... when in reality that performance is because the C2D series have double the cash of the CD series (at least on mac platforms).

Re:Always Suspicious of These

[Ngarrang]

As with all computing benchmarks, YMMV.

There are applications where CPU speed is a marginal component of the speed. Some apps require large memory to run correctly, or fast disk access, or fast graphics access.

Will this new processor benefit the tasks that 95% of do each day like e-mail, web browsing, word processor and slashdot posting? More speed will certainly allow me to open more windows at once, along with a increase in RAM. The performance should be a boon for gamer and science communities, though. Optimized your app for this processor and watch the simulation fly! Is there anything in most OSes that could benefit from these advanced optimizations?

I wish we could faster advances in the performance of memory and drive access to match all of this CPU wizardry. With the growing presence of solid-state disk drives, I wonder if we will see a new SATA/SAS version that can support the rates a RAM drive is truly capable of.

Re:Always Suspicious of These

[tomstdenis]

That's bullshit, the core2 is a different design, not just larger cache when compared to the core. First, the core is a pentium M, which iirc has 2 pipes for ALU, one of which does load/store as well. The core2 has 3 pipes for ALU and dedicated pipes for load/store.

The core2 is faster because fundamentally the IPC of the core is a lot higher on average. The larger cache does help but the benefits decay exponentially. So from the 1MB and 2MB parts to the 4MB part the benefits are not as high as you'd think.

Tom

Poor AMD

[xBOISEx]

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...

Re:Quick summary

[Trelane]

expect a per clock advantage of about 10%.

If my calculation takes 9 days instead of 10, I'd call that a win.

The other question is power consumption.

doesn't matter...

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:Is this a laptop chip

[644bd346996]

Yes, laptops are dominant, or more precisely, power efficiency now matters. That's why Intel threw away the NetBurst/P4 architecture and developed Core from the Pentium M architecture. Laptops are more profitable, and people are starting to care about noise and power consumption in desktops and HTPCs as well.

This seems to be a new pattern for Intel. The Core processors were all mobile oriented, and the Core 2 introduced desktop processors, too. The mobile processors are now being treated as the flagship products. And for good reason, too. Intel seems to be the best when it comes to laptop chips.

Re:Is this a laptop chip

[Kjella]

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?

Over the desktop? Not really, given how much the market has increased in recent years. The price of a laptop is not far over the prices of a comparable PC, hard disk space and GPU power is enough that most people don't have to compromise.

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.

But if you're not really falling into either of these four, there's not really much of a reason to go with a desktop, unless you know it'll be fixed in one location 90% of the time. Many people don't have a dedicated "computer area", they sit down at a suitable desk, use it then afterwards pack it away. Many people want to take it places, school, work, friends, cabin, road trips, whatever. Most people want that over the three 5 1/4" bays (DVD-burner and ???), four 3 1/2" bays (2-500GB disk + ???), 7 PCIe expansion slots (GFX card + ???) and all the other empty space they get in a desktop.

Re:which brings up a point...

[Kjella]

Simple:
Sale in generation n: Xn%

Market share of instruction set introduced in last generation: X1%
Market share of instruction set introduced two generations ago: X1%+X2%
Market share of instruction set introduced three generations ago: X1%+X2%+X3%

Sure you can go for SSE3 today... or wait for SSE5 which will come in 6 months + several years to get actual market share.

Great! However...

[Bullfish]

All we need now is software that will take advantage of all these cores.

Kinda Pointless

[walmartshopper67]

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?