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...
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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.