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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
220 Comments
View All Comments
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Yep. Provided that there's no cheating going on here, then gratz to Intel. I'm not a fanboi of either camp, so may the best chip win!BrownTown - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
is there a catach ehre that I'm not seeing or something?, just can't believe that a new processor could spank the old generation that bad in gaming.Lifted - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The catch is my next CPU will be an Intel. It was nice knowing you AMD.Patrese - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Any news about the price of this thing? If it is priced properly, I mean, if it is not 40% more money for 20% more performance, then I'd say WOW. If it is about the same prices we have today, then it'd be some massive kick on AMD a**...Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Prices were posted at DailyTech a few weeks ago - the 2.67Ghz chip is $540, the 2.4 is $300 or so.Furen - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
4 speed grades will be offered at launch so I'm sure there will be something that is priced low enough for most of us. I wonder how much of a performance hit the 2MB L2 parts will have, though, since I was those will be the more affordable ones.brownba - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
there's gotta be some catch, right?Intel even overclocked the competition... that's quite admirable.
brownba - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
spankBrassbud - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I don't know why anyone is finding this surprising. Haven't you all seen OCed Pentium M benchmarks? In many tasks a Pentium M is 10-20% faster than a comparably clocked A64. So now that we basicly have an optimized, die shunk Pentium M on the desktop that runs at comparable clock speeds to an A64, why is anyone surprised that performance is ~20% better on average?Yes, the performance is impressive. Yes, its disappointing in some ways to see Intel on top given all the success of the underdog AMD lately. But no, I am not surprised in anyway by these results. Perhaps there are inequalities in the benchmarks, perhaps not, but anyone who didn't see this coming wasn't being realistic.
stupid - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Actually, it is not at all surprising given the fact that Socket AM2 is merely a socket change for the moment. Other than DDR2 support, virtualization, and some other things that I don't know about, AMD officially announced that there will not be much initial performance gains. Hence the fact that with the exception of the Athlon 64 5000+, all releases of the AM2 CPU will match the speeds of the S939 Athlons.There probably will not be any increases in speeds until AMD switches over to the 65nm process. While it is disappointing that AMD is not releasing a next generation CPU to compete with Intel this year, this is a transistional year for AMD. While it is possible to release a 65nm next generation CPU in a new socket, it is also prone to become a potential bust if the process does not go smoothly. Using the 65nm process and Socket AM2 on a current product is a smart move because it is already a stable product so less can go wrong.
A company can't always be on top of their game. It's always a leap frog race where the competition is always trying to get ahead of the other. Look at what's going on between ATI and nVidia, granted GPUs do have shorter product cycles than CPUs. Anyone, who expects AMD to remain on top of Intel and release new products at the same time does not truly understand the concept of competition in conjunction with research and developement.