Intel's Core 2 Desktop Processors Tested 335
Steve Kerrison writes "It's early morning here in the UK, but that doesn't stop us from being around to see the launch of Conroe and friends, Intel's newest desktop chips. Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests. Now that's bound to get the fanboy blood pumping, right? We've also taken a look at a pre-built system that's powered by the Extreme X6800 CPU, along with an nForce 4 SLI chipset. As you'd expect, it's quick."
More Detailed Review Here - (Score:5, Informative)
There's a much more detailed review up at HotHardware.com [hothardware.com]
Kyle Bennet seems to disagree... (Score:3, Informative)
OCAU's view (Score:5, Informative)
More in-depth review (Score:5, Informative)
OCAU also has a review! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Loss Leader? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Loss Leader? (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt they'd do a loss leader thing (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at their current pricing, it's not real supprising. You find you can get a Pentium D 65nm for as little as $175. That gets you a 3GHz one on their old 90nm technology. The price creaps up on the first incriment, a 3.2 is $217. However it takes a sizable jump then to $317 for 3.4GHz. The 3.6GHZ, if you can find it, is $500 or so. Past that, well there's only the "extreme" edition and that's over $1000 for 3.73GHz.
The jumps like that are normal. They can easily produce low speed chips and there's a large market for them so they are cheap. Maybe a couple incremental upgrades. Then you hit a knee and prices start jumping fast.
Based on their current pricing for their current high end, I don't see anything out of the oridinary for this new pricing.
Erroneous price/performance in headline (Score:5, Informative)
Some more real-life benchmarks (Score:2, Informative)
Re:first PC's? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow, Intel!!! (Score:5, Informative)
TDP of Athlon FX-64: 125W
Whoops!
16+ Core 2 Benchmarks are list here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Energy efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
I own a Fujitsu Amilo V2000 laptop (in the UK) which uses the original Intel Centrino chipset. I work mostly at home, but am on the move once or twice a week. Several times early in its' life (first few months while the battery is fresh) I had come home in the evening from an onsite job, then got up in the morning and switch the laptop on and started work only to have the battery warning (10%) give me a nudge around 4pm (from a 9am start). My work is web development, so while it's not too intensive I'm running email, web radio, text editors etc. constantly. Admittedly it was running on a wired network, and using the built in wireless chip results in a loss of an hour or two from that figure...
I was completely amazed the first time it happened - forgetting to plug it in I assumed it would die a couple of hours later but it lasted almost the entire workday. (Other notes about that model : the battery itself died after 6 months, how annoying... and the screen is a bit glarey but overall I was very happy with the laptop.)
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
together with the gig of ram and the 256mb Nvidia 7300 GPU, I think this thing would run Vista.
Not that it ever will, of course. Any Win OS after Win2k sucks; took me forever to get WinXP media center off this thing.
Re:first PC's? (Score:4, Informative)
Unbelievable.
Here's the answer the GP was probably looking for (from Anandtech's conclusion [anandtech.com]):
Re:first PC's? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sadly.... (Score:4, Informative)
This figure is meaningless in modern CPUs as processors perform a variable number of instructions per cycle depending on (a) what instruction (b) whether data is in cache (c) whether there are pipeline stalls to account for. The best you can hope for is the number of cycles of some standardised performance test that are executed in a specific time, which is what articles like this one provide.
I've got to wonder if you read the article, 'cause if you did, you'd know that these processors run at a slower clock rate than existing ones, so you really wouldn't be accusing anyone of comparing GHz.
False (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct about Yonah though.
Re:Wow, Intel!!! (Score:1, Informative)
whereas the AMD one is the max thermal, and will not exceed, and
they use the same number on several processors. I wish they'd use
the same metric.
Typical "hardware enthusiast" article (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that this is not the first time that Intel has focused on IPC, that integrated memory controllers are not evil, and that few people fully understand the detailed workings of SSE (definitely not me). These are all instances of marketing BS. But they don't really mean anything. The benchmarks show that the Core architecture has much better IPC than the P4, regardless of whether this is due to the extra pipeline, shorter pipelines, better cache, lower memory latency, etc. And the benchmarks also show that the Core has better memory latency than P4 despite the external memory controller. And lastly Intel has drastically improved the floating point performance of the Core processor over its predecessor, the Pentium M, thanks to improvements in the SSE unit, whatever those improvements may be.
This is always going to happen when a journalistic organ is supported by sponsors from the industry it covers. The editors are obligated to include a bunch of marketing BS. You can get valuable information from these compromised sources, but you have to read between the lines.
Re:False (Score:3, Informative)
Intel will still sell Yonahs because the die is smaller and not everyone needs 64-bit support (or the additional speed). They will become the "cheap" processor for laptops while still remaining profitable.