Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
While we're still comparing to Socket-939 and only using RD480, it does seem very unlikely that AMD would be able to make up this much of a deficit with Socket-AM2 and RD580. With Conroe's performance advantage averaging over 20% it looks like Intel's confidence has been well placed.
Also keep in mind that we are over six months away from the actual launch of Conroe, performance can go up from where it is today. We also only looked at the 2.66GHz part, the Extreme Edition version of Conroe will most likely be clocked around 3.0GHz which will extend the performance advantage even further.
AMD still does have some time to surprise us with AM2, but from what we've seen today, they are going to have to do a lot of work to close this gap. We saw performance today in the two areas that we were most concerned about with Conroe: gaming and media encoding, and in both Intel greatly exceeded our expectations. Also remember that Conroe should be lower power than the AMD offering we compared it to, although we weren't able to measure power consumption at the wall in our brief time with the systems.
Going into IDF we expected to see a good showing from Conroe, but leaving IDF, well, now we just can't wait to have it.
More from the show as we get it...
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
220 Comments
View All Comments
SilverBack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
You can't necessarily judge times for encoding as the files encoded were probably different.EnergyWatcher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
> You can't necessarily judge times for encoding as the files encoded were probably different. <Anand should have noted it if the files were different and the results, therefore, were not comparable. I didn't see anything like that in this review.
-e
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The files were different, whenever benchmarks were identical to what we've run for our CPU reviews in the past I tried to mention as such. Otherwise you can't assume that the numbers are comparable to previous reviews using our own hardware.Take care,
Anand
SilverBack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
As far as I can tell his post above has merit.The BIOS Version 6.00 PG0 pre dates 2004....
What exactly is going on here?
Tuor - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I don't see how you could say that Intel has regained the speed crown when the product hasn't even shipped yet. Sure, you can say it is *poised* to regain the speed title, but doesn't the headline jump the gun a bit? I think so.BTW, call me a AMD fanboi if you want, but there are reasons, despite pure speed or even bang-for-the-buck, that make me not want to buy Intel's chips: I *despise* their business practices. If the were to change their ways, as OCZ appears to have done, then I will reconsider, but not until then.
overclockingoodness - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
It hasn't been proven that Intel uses strong-arm tactics by the court of law. Until I get a statement from the court convicting Intel, I won't care what AMD has to say. Intel and AMD are both in it to make money, there's no way AMD is the innocent underdog they claim themselves to be.Sunrise089 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Just because a company that is "in it to make money" does not make them unable to be declared "innocent". Instead, AMD tries to make money in order to better their shareholders, and all the while gives us wonderful parts in our PCs, helps the economy, creates jobs, and assists in international trade. It isn't either company's pursuit of capitalism and therefore profits that makes one good or evil, it's Intel's corruption of capitalism by denying fair competition that creates the problem.gimpsoft - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
are those CPUs full DRM ?Bladen - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The K8 has the advantages of the integrated memory controller and hyper transport. are these features not more advanced than what is in Conroe?It's not like AMD are still using punchcards...
Al though this prefomance advantage is as big as I had hoped, and bigger than I expected.
EnergyWatcher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
From the article:------
Both systems had a pair of Radeon X1900 XTs running in CrossFire and as far as we could tell, the drivers and the rest of the system setup was identical. They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves, the results of those benchmarks are on the following pages.
------
Why does the AMD system's BIOS screen say "AMD Processor Model Unknown" and "(C) 1984-2003"? And what about "AwardBIOS v6.00PG"? Are they really running the AMD system with a BIOS that's so old that it predates the entire FX-series, and (IIRC) the entire Athlon 64 (K8) series?
And why does this page documenting ***AMD K7*** motherboards list an "Abit KX7-333" (among others) using "Award BIOS v6.00PG"? http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/kt333-rou...">http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/kt333-rou...
And what does this "misconfiguration" mean for how the BIOS and OS configured the processor and system? Could that explain Intel's "superior" performance?
-e