Intel Harpertown (Penryn) Quad CPUs Benchmarked

unts writes "The Intel Developer Forum is currently running in San Francisco, and Intel is showing off the up-coming Harpertown processors based on the Penryn core. HEXUS got hands on with a test system and ran some performance tests: 'Harpertown is a better quad-core processor than Clovertown: it's as simple as that. More L2 cache will gobble-up larger application data-sets and a higher FSB, on select models, will ensure that per-CPU bandwidth is less of a concern.'"

Comments

Re:Yarr.

[MBCook]

There is a big difference. While L2 almost always helps (especially with the cores be so much faster than the memory bus), Intel's current designs end up in bus contention if you try to use them to much. While the Opteron's have their own memory controllers, all four cores on this chip have to go through the Northbridge to get to memory, so they have to share those two channels.

It used to be even worse. When Intel was pulling the dual-dual core thing, to access one core was wicked quick, to access the other two cores had to go over the FSB and contend with memory traffic and such.

Until Intel's upcoming platforms that look suspiciously like what AMD has been doing for years (on-die memory controller, point to point serial bus, etc)... extra cache can make a big difference for them.