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

Quick summary

[Anonymous Coward]

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%.

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

[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.

which brings up a point...

[plasmacutter]

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..

Is this a laptop chip

[bcmm]

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?

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.

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...

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.

that's not all folks..

[GonzoTech]

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.

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

[Tom Womack]

Firefox NoScript is the answer to all this kind of stupidity; I think it's worth using Firefox for NoScript alone.

Also, remind your hosts file that intellitxt.com is a synonym for 127.0.0.1

Yes, this is depriving hexus of advertising revenue. If they want advertising revenue, they should produce adverts which do not deeply infuriate their readers. Intelligently-targetted intellitxt might be actually usable, but to have every occurence of 'computer' hyperlinked to Dell's store is of no use to anybody.

a review you can actually read

[Tom Womack]

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.

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

[TheThiefMaster]

Or just use the AdBlock Plus extension, which blocks all the advert scripts without disabling any of the other scripts on the site.

It also has the advantage of blocking gif image ads on other sites that NoScript misses.

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

[GIL_Dude]

Exactly. I didn't see any ads there at all and none of these text bombs people wrote about.

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?