Previewing the Performance of the Intel Conroe 114
pirate rtt writes "bit-tech has spent some time with an Intel Conroe system and has published a preview of its performance as compared to the current Intel flagship chip - the Presler 965. From the article: 'Core 2 Duo is clearly a very capable processor. We found that it was faster than the current 965 processor in most situations on the desktop, and far more proficient at gaming - an area where Intel has traditionally been weak. The added memory bandwidth that will come from having faster RAM enabled on the Core 2 Extreme chips will be an extra bonus for those looking to Conroe as a gaming platform.'"
Conroe vs. FX-62 (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the FX-62 does lose... badly in several cases..
Re:Wait for v2 (Score:5, Informative)
"Traditionally been weak" ? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure there's more than enough people here who remember how intel poorly comparbadly the K6 ran Doom, for example.
Not to mention the atrocious record of motherboard chipsets for >K6 AMD processors that, alone, contributed more to slowing their uptake by the market than any other factor (it astounds me that VIA has managed to stay in business).
Re:Technical Prowess of Reviewer? (Score:3, Informative)
On another note, it is up to the developer of the optimize his/her program for the best performance. Individual tasks inside a program can be made to run single threaded or multithreaded based on how well that part of the program performs. The programmer must make these decisions or leave them to the compiler. In many cases the programmers will understand that the compiler is building generic code that may not be suitable for their program.
These benchmarks were run as single threaded or multithreaded. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with multitasking. Multitasking is running several programs or processes simultaneously. The individual programs in these benchmarks may not have been that optimized for these tasks and may have left significant headroom for other processes to run efficiently. An example of this is that many programs that I use on a dual processor G5 will never take full utilization of the available processing power. It may take running several instances of a process to fully load up the CPU utilization on the system. This is why virtualization is being looked at as a holy grail of saving money in the data-center as it will allow those data-centers to make better use of their investments.
Next time you are encoding audio or video go check your task manager or activity monitor and look to see what your CPU utilization is. Go load your web browser and surf around a while. You will not notice the encoding stop, it may slow for a few cycles every time you load a new page. This is your computer multitasking. Multithreading is allowing an individual process or program to do more things at once instead of waiting for an invidiudal task to complete before moving on to another task. You do not need multiple processors to take advantage of multithreading, nor do you need that crap called Hyper-Threading.
I thought this was a place for geeks and nerds who knew something.
Re:About Time (Score:4, Informative)
You get twice as many general registers in AMD64 mode, providing a nice performance boost independent of how much memory you have. Java, cryptography, and codecs react particularly well to AMD64 environments.
2GB RAM is already pretty standard for power users. Throw in virtual memory and, voila, you're at the 4GB barrier. Being able to run the same 64-bit binaries on your notebook as on your quad processor, 8 core 64GB RAM server is kinda nice too.