Previewing the Performance of the Intel Conroe

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.'"

Re:Wait for v2

[iezhy]

shortly after relase of core duo, there was an article going around, which outlined that chip has over 30 bugs, and Intel is planning to fix only few of them...

Multithreading issues?

[ZachPruckowski]

The benchmarks show a serious drop in multi-tasking capabilities in Conroe relative to the P XE 965. In some cases, a multi-tasking Conroe was beaten by a multi-tasking PXE.

However, we have some worries about its multi-tasking performance, which doesn't appear to be quite as good as the chip that Conroe will be replacing later this year.
We found that it was faster than the current flagship Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor in nearly every single-threaded scenario, but there were times where Conroe fell behind in multi-tasking scenarios.

That seems pretty bad if we're trying to move to a more multi-threaded and multi-tasking computer system (yes, I know the difference between the two).

Re:About Time

[TheRaven64]

I write code on my PowerBook that is going to be deployed on either a 64-CPU IRIX box, a 40-node UltraSPARC cluster, or a 64-node dual-Xeon cluster. Some of this code mmaps large blocks of data. It doesn't matter that I don't have that much physical memory, because not all of it will be loaded at once.

Remember, it is not uncommon to use more address space than you have physical memory. This is why we have swap.

Re:AMD is in big trouble

[wild_berry]

AMD's technology preview day (Anandtech's report is at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2768 [anandtech.com]) said a lot that made me wonder about the future competitivenes of AMD. I'm neutral but the kind of stuff they were talking about made me doubt my conviction that Intel are guaranteed to pwn, but I am certain that the consumer is the winner in the upcoming battle for the best desktop CPU chips (and that's already been noted in the drop in prices between the two http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/06/02/drop_in_a verage_processor_pricing/ [tomshardware.co.uk]).

The notion of being able to put extra specialised hardware next to the CPU radically alters the way that PC's are going to be laid out and is a good lateral step along the road toward multi-threaded, multi-cored and multiple processing elements in computing. The K8L architecture and beyond are seeking to increase IPC throughput for AMD's chips as Intel has done for the Core architecture. I think that this throughput increase is the greatest asset to the Core's performance both for performance per cycle (==IPC) and performance per watt.

Re:And what makes this review different?

[Anonymous Coward]

--You are "snorreh", a well-known AMD fanboy who posts on www.aceshardware.com forums. You've openly admitted that anything Intel releases won't be good enough for you. I highly suggest any readers of your posts be "sceptical".

The Conroe myth gets busted a little bit every day

[Visaris]

We found that it was faster than the current flagship Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor in nearly every single-threaded scenario, but there were times where Conroe fell behind in multi-tasking scenarios.

I think that's a very funny quote. This is exactly what I was expecting all along. The reason most people have been running Super-PI and other toy benchmarks is because they are single-threaded, and that is the one area where Conroe really shines.

If the Conroe can't beat the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 how is it going "own" or "destroy" an Athlon 64 FX-64? The Conroe myth gets busted a little bit every day.