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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Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I never said I didn't trust Anand's reviews.YOU said that Intel's have not been verified. I pointed out that neither have Anands.
StriderGT - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Wake up call from HW land:Intel produces intel procs...
Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Oh, and by the way, a little google search will show you that the A64 benchmarks are right on.StriderGT - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I hope u did not look at intel's or apple's sites...JackPack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Why would there even be a mention of A64 on those sites?flyingpan - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I think the additional 32bit alu reserved for 64bit operation of Conroe is used for 32bit power-up, but what results about 64bit?flyingpan - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I want to see 64bit benchmarks on upcoming MS Windows Vista(64bit)flyingpan - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
And 32bit benchmarks on Vista too....it would be closeJackPack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Let go, the straws you're hanging on to are about to break.rayo123 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I didn't see anything about fp specs. I don't care about games. My main processor hungry apps use a lot of floating point. I'm sure the new design will help, the question is how much. If it's 10% vs 40% for fp, it's not much use to me, except may be in the overclocking potential.