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
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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ninjit - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Just wondering if Apple has any sort of presence at IDF?I know they are waiting for something better than the P4 from intel before they migrate the Power Mac line over from PPC, Conroes seems like it will fit the bill nicely.
Also, will conroe have 64-bit addressing? I didn't see anything stated on the slides you put up.
Thanks.
Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The real question is can Conroe be put in multiple socket configurations? Thats what matters for the Power Mac/Mac Pro (whatever its called). Apple has their "Quad" configuration, and unless they plan on decreasing the amount of power available on the high end, they might need to dip in the Woodcrest pool in order to provide the same amount of threads and horsepower that is currently available. I'd even venture to say that its not out of the picture for Apple to use quad core chips come this December in a 2S configuration for eight cores in a high end power mac.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Apple will most likely use Conroe in the Power Mac replacement this fall. Conroe, Merom and Woodcrest are all 64-bit processors. I'll be able to talk more about the architecture tomorrow.Take care,
Anand
DarthPierce - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Though not Anand, I can say that this is the chip generation apple is looking for, and I can say that Conroe is 64 bit.Quodlibet - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
can you disclose the bus speed (1067 vs 1333 mhz) ?Quodlibet - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
oops in the article it says 1067 ...JackPack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Probably 1066. I'm not Anand, so obviously, I can't confirm.But only Conroe XE (3.33 or 3.0) should be 1333. All XE and non-XE are 4 MB.
danidentity - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I thought Conroe was supposed to be released in July. But the article states the release is still six months out. Did something change?hans007 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
i think the idea with the 2.8 ghz x2 was smart.that is just about all amd will be able to ship in september when conroe comes out, as thats basically the top speed their architecture is doing maybe 3.0 ghz next year.
amd's roadmaps dont show a 65nm transition until 2007 anyway.
face it the conroe is agood chip. everyone knew it would be. it uses a lot of good tech, micro-ops fusion, share l2 caches, etc.
not to mention this isnt even the best one as the 2.93 ghz /1333 bus EE one with 4mb instead of 2mb cache would be likely even faster. also
to the ones who said it'll be gpu limited, by the time these cards are out, another generation of gpus will probably be ready anyway since the 7900gt/gtx is just a shrink and 1900xt is also not a major change from 1800xt. we could see a chip based on the xbox360gpu and a futher evolution of the nvidia architecture by then.
Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Even cutting the performance advantage in half would still be a tremendous improvement.What makes me wonder is why is Intel still 6 months away from production? If I were them, I'd get them out in July or August, instead of September or October.