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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RichUK - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Good read good read. Thanks for the honesty and accuracy on the updates.MrKaz - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Intel road map says Q4. Not Q3.And 6 months from now is Q4 not Q3.
AMD new K8 will boast performance by 10%. If .65nm boost the frequency of new K8 since .13 » .09 doesn’t seem to do pretty much on that aspect.
Then we will have some good war.
Don’t forget that this processor when working in single core have a huge L2 (4MB) vs the only 1MB from AMD. That boost the performance a lot in many applications. So the difference in Quake4, ... is amazing but not that much.
MrKaz - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Sorry i mean that 6 months from now is still Q3, but intel road map says Q4.Von Matrices - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Didn't that CPU have 2MB L2 and not 4MB L2?Anemone - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
If 20% improvement on Athlon the P4 is officially last, last, last years news, and a dog./bye P4
Anemone - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
You are really top rate reviewers. Check and recheck, and always forthright about things that needed correcting. Kudos!PrinceGaz - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Thanks for this follow-up article, it covers pretty much every question that was raised except one. In the original article you mention "the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems". Have you any information on why it needed modifying and what was changed, and whether the changes would have any effect on the AMD system (either positive or negative).Chadder007 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
I think its because they needed to change the drivers to recognize the dual core capabilities of the Conroe, since they are multithreaded capable now from ATI.redbone75 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
One thing I haven't really noticed many people talking about in all of this Conroe stuff is the price to performance ratio Conroe brings. If it were released now, Conroe would offer a significant increase in performance over AMD's top offering at half the price ($540? for Conroe 2.66 and $1000+ for an FX60 right now). Sure, AMD will reduce the prices of it's processors once Intel launches the Core line and AM2 is ramping up, but I doubt it will be significant enough to entice unbiased buyers away from Conroe if it is the superior performing chip. I personally have favored Intel's chips over AMD's simply because I'm not a heavy gamer and didn't need the insane frame rates, and before dual core chips arrived I've always found my computing experience to be a little smoother b/c of hyperthreading (I've built several AMD systems for clients and friends). With the advent of dual core chips, I was eventually going to build a new system around an X2, but then when looking at the great overclockability of the Presler core and the lower price I kinda balked at that switch. Maybe others will do the same with AMD vs. Conroe: AMD might lower their prices such that buyers will go for it and simply overclock to close the performance deficit. But, then again we did just see an overclocked FX60 get bested by Conroe, at least according to current data (had to throw that in there lest the might of the fanboys smote me where I sit). Oh, well, I could be wrong, but that's my human right:-)dysonlu - Sunday, March 12, 2006 - link
Intel will charge a premium for it. You can mark my word. It's simply naive to expect the new chip to offer both the best performance AND the best value.Boy, people can so easily get carried away, being too optimistic and enthusiastic.