Unimpressive #

By Mark Harrison Posted Wednesday 18th April 2007 13:51 GMT

Comparing quad core to quad core (the only fair comparison, because we don't know how the dual-core Conroe would compare to the QX6800 on these apps).

25% more FSB bandwidth (1333 MHz vs. 1066 MHz)

13.7% more clock rate (3.33 GHz vs. 2.93 GHz)

New SSE4 instructions

Differences in cache sizes are not known.

Except for one app (DivX 6), the typical speedup is 25%. I don't count the 3D Mark Pro Overall either, because it is probably very dependent on the graphics card.

So Intel is getting about 10% performance beyond clock. I wonder how much of this is the faster FSB, how much may be due to cache size differences, how much is SSE4, and how much are other microarchitectural improvements.

I would like to see benchmarks Penryn dual-core vs. the fastest dual-core Conroe.

I don't know how much more Intel will improve the performance, or if they will offer higher clock rates than 3.33 GHz, but in its Quad-Core form Penryn does not appear to offer any significant advantage over Barcelona.

I expect Intel will offer Penryn Xeons with very large caches to maximize performance.

2008 will be the year of the great quad-core parity.

Get ready for the price war.