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
Intel is very excited about its new Core architecture, especially with Conroe on the desktop. It's not really news to anyone that Intel hasn't had the desktop performance crown for years now; its Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors run hotter and offer competitive or lower performance than their AMD competitors. With Conroe, Intel hopes to change all of that.
From top to bottom - Quad-core 65nm Kentsfield, dual core 65nm Conroe and 65nm Pentium D
Intel setup two identical systems: in one corner, an Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked to 2.8GHz running on a DFI RD480 motherboard. And in the other corner, a Conroe running at 2.66GHz (1067MHz FSB) on an Intel 975X motherboard.
The AMD system used 1GB of DDR400 running at 2-2-2/1T timings, while the Intel system used 1GB of DDR2-667 running at 4-4-4. 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. Tomorrow we'll be able to go into great depth on the architecture of Conroe, but for now enjoy the benchmarks.
As far as we could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).
Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. We won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but we couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups.
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JumpingJack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Conroe will be out in the first week in July. Merom will be out end of Aug/start of Sept. with Woodcrest to follow shortly after.kalaap - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Well with Intel picking up Apple as another customer, they probably need a little more time to ramp up volume shipments.JackPack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Apple is small potatoes. They sell around 1.25 million Macs per quarter.Intel manufactures around 40 million processors in the same period.
Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
They may, remember Yonah shipped six months early.Intel also likes to have lots of product in the pipeline when something is launched. All the board people and system makers have to be ready. That's why you can buy a Dell ot HP system on the day Intel launches a chip.
I'll bet you that right now Conroe in being manufactuered on production lines.
Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Well thats what I'm thinking - I kinda expect Merom and Conroe in time for WWDC in early August (pushed back from its usual July timeframe). The fact that it was pushed back a month makes me a little suspicious on that Apple is waiting for Intel to annouce and ship the parts.Justin Case - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
At the resolution and settings level they tested most games (ex., FEAR), the game is GPU-limited, not CPU-limited. In other words, if the graphics card, chipset and driver really were matched, the game would perform at exactly the same speed, and the difference would be in the CPU load (a faster CPU would show a lower load, because it would spend more time waiting for the GPU to finish rendering each frame). I have a feeling the drivers had some strategic "tweaks"...Also, bear in mind that a 20% performance increase is to be _expected_ from a product to be released four months from now (in other words, it's simply following Moore's law).
But anyway, if you trust benchmark results coming from Intel (or AMD), you might as well believe Apple's marketing. I'll wait for the real product, and independent testing, thank you very much. I still remember Intel's claims about the original Pentium 4 (3 times faster than the Pentium III, they said) and Prescott (a.k.a. Pres-hot!), not to mention the Itanium, the Paxville Xeons, etc., etc., etc....
DarthPierce - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Your inability to grasp what being GPU limited means or when it occurs astounds me. an example of GPU limited would be you're running FEAR at 1600x1200 on an ati 9600. In this example, any cpu (that doesn't suck horribly) would give roughly equally bad scores.If the CPU is changed and the score changes, that itself shows that a task is not GPU limited.
Think!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
We were limited to 1280 x 1024 because of the LCDs we were testing on, but a dual X1900 XT setup isn't going to be GPU limited at 1280 x 1024.As I posted above:
"As far as I could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).
Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. I won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but I couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups. "
Take care,
Anand
Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Use your head, if it was GPU limited, there would not be a performance increase between the systems with a different cpu. The vid card would cap the frame rates.BTW, do you really think a x1900 crossfire system is GPU limited at 1280x1024?
AndreasM - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
You should read his post more carefully. What he is saying is, that because F.E.A.R. is GPU-limited these results cannot be correct, because there should be no performance increase. I do however agree that it probably isn't GPU-limited at that resolution.