Conroe Performance Preview Follow-Up
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2006 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The Benchmark Issue
Although we mentioned that there’s not much you can do to make a timedemo really favor one CPU architecture over another, you all demanded that we try with one of our demos. We put our Quake 4 demo file on a USB drive and copied it over to the Conroe and Athlon 64 FX-60 systems that Intel had setup. Note that the version of Quake 4 installed was 1.0.5.0 which is newer than what we test with in our CPU reviews, so you can’t directly compare the numbers to previous AnandTech results but at least we’d be able to see if Intel’s Quake 4 demo was somehow giving Conroe the unfair advantage.
We re-ran Intel’s Quake 4 demo to confirm our initial results. Much to our surprise, we actually short-changed Intel the first time around. We noted that Conroe held a 28% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 with SMP disabled, but with it enabled the performance advantage shrunk to 15%. We re-tested and confirmed our suspicions that Conroe’s Quake 4 performance with SMP enabled was more in line at a 24% advantage:
But what we’re really interested in is how Conroe performed in the very same Quake 4 demo that has been favoring AMD processors in all of our CPU reviews. We loaded up our Quake 4 demo and had at it:
With SMP enabled we see that Conroe holds an even larger 31% performance advantage and with it disabled, the unreleased CPU was 29% faster. If anything, Intel’s own demo was a little more conservative on Conroe and definitely not optimized to make AMD look bad.
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Larso - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
This conroe thing is truly interesting news. At last Intel has dropped the netburst mishap and developed a useable cpu.Furen - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Man, we didnt see so many people complaining about netburst when it was whoring the Athlon XP... I agree that it needed to be replaced but it wasn't all bad...Darth Farter - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
looks like this round is going to Intel as it did with the northwood.Let's see what the underdog will have in store for us.
I myself suspect AMD having much more focused on the quad core server arena where it's likely going to whoop ass the way conroe is doing now in regards with FP performance
stelleg151 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Great work, and Im glad you got that FEAR anomoly worked out. It is definately exciting seeing such a leap in performance.That being said, I personally would have put a little bit more emphasis on the fact that these processors are still scheduled to be 3-6 months away, as this is in the most extreme sense a PREview and not a REview.
IHYLN - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
good job clearing the air Anand. And whoever was that person was who called me an idiot for saying the crossfire 1900xt setup was GPU limited, I snub my nose at thee.Great job on intel's part for actually making a desirable CPU and I hope AMD can match or exceed.
Calin - Monday, March 13, 2006 - link
At least a lower price will benefit everyone. As long as processor performance is concerned, AMD won't gain the crown easily. Looks like Intel will be on top again.I say this is good, as prices for AMD processors were a bit static. I hope for a price war :D