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
Intel is very excited about its new Core architecture, especially with Conroe on the desktop. It's not really news to anyone that Intel hasn't had the desktop performance crown for years now; its Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors run hotter and offer competitive or lower performance than their AMD competitors. With Conroe, Intel hopes to change all of that.
From top to bottom - Quad-core 65nm Kentsfield, dual core 65nm Conroe and 65nm Pentium D
Intel setup two identical systems: in one corner, an Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked to 2.8GHz running on a DFI RD480 motherboard. And in the other corner, a Conroe running at 2.66GHz (1067MHz FSB) on an Intel 975X motherboard.
The AMD system used 1GB of DDR400 running at 2-2-2/1T timings, while the Intel system used 1GB of DDR2-667 running at 4-4-4. Both systems had a pair of Radeon X1900 XTs running in CrossFire and as far as we could tell, the drivers and the rest of the system setup was identical. They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves, the results of those benchmarks are on the following pages. Tomorrow we'll be able to go into great depth on the architecture of Conroe, but for now enjoy the benchmarks.
As far as we could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).
Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. We won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but we couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups.
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ninjit - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Just wondering if Apple has any sort of presence at IDF?I know they are waiting for something better than the P4 from intel before they migrate the Power Mac line over from PPC, Conroes seems like it will fit the bill nicely.
Also, will conroe have 64-bit addressing? I didn't see anything stated on the slides you put up.
Thanks.
Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The real question is can Conroe be put in multiple socket configurations? Thats what matters for the Power Mac/Mac Pro (whatever its called). Apple has their "Quad" configuration, and unless they plan on decreasing the amount of power available on the high end, they might need to dip in the Woodcrest pool in order to provide the same amount of threads and horsepower that is currently available. I'd even venture to say that its not out of the picture for Apple to use quad core chips come this December in a 2S configuration for eight cores in a high end power mac.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Apple will most likely use Conroe in the Power Mac replacement this fall. Conroe, Merom and Woodcrest are all 64-bit processors. I'll be able to talk more about the architecture tomorrow.Take care,
Anand
DarthPierce - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Though not Anand, I can say that this is the chip generation apple is looking for, and I can say that Conroe is 64 bit.Quodlibet - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
can you disclose the bus speed (1067 vs 1333 mhz) ?Quodlibet - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
oops in the article it says 1067 ...JackPack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Probably 1066. I'm not Anand, so obviously, I can't confirm.But only Conroe XE (3.33 or 3.0) should be 1333. All XE and non-XE are 4 MB.
danidentity - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I thought Conroe was supposed to be released in July. But the article states the release is still six months out. Did something change?hans007 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
i think the idea with the 2.8 ghz x2 was smart.that is just about all amd will be able to ship in september when conroe comes out, as thats basically the top speed their architecture is doing maybe 3.0 ghz next year.
amd's roadmaps dont show a 65nm transition until 2007 anyway.
face it the conroe is agood chip. everyone knew it would be. it uses a lot of good tech, micro-ops fusion, share l2 caches, etc.
not to mention this isnt even the best one as the 2.93 ghz /1333 bus EE one with 4mb instead of 2mb cache would be likely even faster. also
to the ones who said it'll be gpu limited, by the time these cards are out, another generation of gpus will probably be ready anyway since the 7900gt/gtx is just a shrink and 1900xt is also not a major change from 1800xt. we could see a chip based on the xbox360gpu and a futher evolution of the nvidia architecture by then.
Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Even cutting the performance advantage in half would still be a tremendous improvement.What makes me wonder is why is Intel still 6 months away from production? If I were them, I'd get them out in July or August, instead of September or October.