Conroe Performance Preview Follow-Up
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2006 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
The performance picture with regards to Conroe hasn’t really changed all that much - on average we’re still seeing a bit over a 20% increase in performance over an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60. While it’s worth noting that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, we really were not able to determine any cause for suspicion based on Intel’s setups. The machines were as clean as they could get, with the BIOS oversight having no tangible impact on most performance.
Believe it or not, Intel doesn't seem malicious in their intent. The AMD system could be better configured by using a RD580 based motherboard instead of a RD480 platform, but other than that there's not much else that can be done to improve the performance of the system Intel used. Obviously we're not going to rely on these initial benchmarks for our final take on Conroe, but the scores are extremely interesting to say the least.
Conroe is supposed to launch in Q3 of this year, and here we are at the end of Q1 with some fairly impressive performance numbers. What could happen over the next quarter or so?
AMD will be launching Socket-AM2 in Q2 of this year, which will bring about more memory bandwidth as well as lower power consumption thanks to the Energy Efficient CPUs that will ship on the platform. We have yet to see whether or not real world performance will go up as a result of the move to DDR2, but it very well may.
On the Intel front, there is a lot of time for performance optimization with regards to Conroe and its platforms. It’s also worth noting that the 2.66GHz E6700 we previewed here is simply a high end mainstream part, it is not an Extreme Edition flavor of Conroe. At 2.8 or 3.0GHz, a Conroe EE would offer even stronger performance than what we’ve seen here.
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Shintai - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
So to summon up with updated benchies, bios etc.Conroe 2.67Ghz beats the 2.8Ghz FX with:
Quake(intel demo) Single 22.4%
Quake(intel demo) SMP 24.8%
Quake(Anand demo) Single 28.7%
Quake(Anand demo) SMP 30.9%
FEAR - min 25.4%
FEAR - max 18.8%
FEAR - avg 19.6%
WMV9 12%
DiVX 6.1 29.5%
iTunes 6.0.1.3 9.7%
UT2004 and HL2 in the 20 - 30% faster range aswell on Conroe according to Anand. But if Intel was mean, they bench this FX with a 3.33Ghz Conroe XE or a 3.0Ghz Woodcrest.
And funny to see Intels dualcore implementation scales better than AMDs.
530$ to get that much more performance than a 1000$ FX chip.
Hell, even the 420$ and maybe 295$ chip is faster.
Both Conroe and AM2 gets DDR-2 800 at retail.
dysonlu - Sunday, March 12, 2006 - link
"530$ to get that much more performance than a 1000$ FX chip.Hell, even the 420$ and maybe 295$ chip is faster."
So, where can I order this amazing 530$ CPU?
It gets on my nerve to see people comparing prices between a computer part that's 6 months away from shipment and one that's shipping now.
Chadder007 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Thanks for the update....just shows us that Intel wasn't fooling around.Even after the BIOS update, the Conroe pounds the fool out of the FX-60. Also I doubt any other changes can help with the AMD performance either, even a chipset upgrade.
plus - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
So the Conroe is 20% faster. Decent result. Of course, the FX60 is on the 90NM process... will be interesting to see what 65NM process brings to the FX series... AMD is due to have that out about the time Conroe is released.Intel always seems to compare best to AMD when they are one shrink ahead. Tells a lot about the strength of the Athlon core.
I didn't see in the article if the Conroe is 64 bit. I've been running winXP64pro since Steam began auto-detecting 64bit capacity... It does seem to run smoother.
Plus
Eris23007 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Furthermore, to add on to the last post in this reply chain, Intel has already announced a transition to 45nm in 2007 - not long after AMD will have their first 65nm chips.
I've been predicting this for a while: AMD has been doing some excellent architectural work, but a good CPU is more than just architecture: the CMOS manufacturing process guys are of equal, if not greater importance. This is also where Intel has their biggest advantage: their CMOS manufacturing excellence is simply unparalleled both in quality and quantity. Say what you will about their architectural choices, but when is the last time you remember Intel failing to pull of a process shrink transition?
coldpower27 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
AMD 65nm products isn't due till 1st Half of 2007. It's also AMD own fault that they are 3-4 Quarters behind Intel typically on process transistions. So hence Intel has 65nm products to show sooner then AMD can. Hence comparisons to AMD's 90nm products are legitimate.Intel's Core Micro-architecture have EM64T by default. This is obvious, you actually think Intel won't include such a thing when basically the bulk of shipping Pentium 4's and Celeron D have it now.
You have to remember the FX 60 was overclocked to 2.8GHZ and the Conroe @ 2.66GHZ beat it by 20% on average, what happens when you use the Conroe XE 3.0GHZ+/1333FSB edition agains the Athlon FX.
spinportal - Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - link
Actually the Pentium D and Xeon lines have EMT64, the Yonah - DuoCore processors do not.So we need real price points, with a comparable 939 NF4 AMD rig on XP64 or Vista-64 Beta2.
But where is the 64-bit push? All hoopla and not worth the aggravation of adoption?
anandtechrocks - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
20% from a CPU alone is a decent result? When is the last time you have gotten 20% performance increase from a new processor? I think the results are amazing, expecially this early in the game.porkster - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
How well does the amazing Conroe overclock? Were you allow to test that?Nighteye2 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
The EE conroe will of course perform a bit better with higher clock speeds, but with the bus limiting it and only so much cache to try to circumvent that I don't expect conroe to scale very well. I'd also like to see 64-bit performance, as the bigger instructions will reduce the advantage of the large cache.