If you or someone you know is planning on buying a new computer soon, you should wait a few more weeks. Intel has a new powerful processor called Conroe about to hit in July. AMD is going to cut cost on most of it's current line 25%-50% because of it. This will take the crown from AMD just for a little while because they have a "Quad Core" due out next year.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/002266.html
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Conroe Performance Update
Posted by Eric Dahl
Wednesday, June 14, 2006, 04:54 PM (PST)
If you've been following the launch of Conroe--Intel's code-name for the Core 2 Duo desktop chips they'll be launching at the end of July--you've probably been all over the benchmarking data that's trickled out onto the web from as far back as spring IDF and as recently as last week. Well, Intel's Conroe benchmarking roadshow finally hit the West coast yesterday, and I took a trip down to Santa Clara to check it out.
Intel showed off 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo chips running a variety of approved benchmarks on systems with 1GB of RAM and pairs of ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire graphics boards. Performance was impressive--the Conroe system scored 7326 on the PC Mark system test (6683 on its CPU test and 5628 on the memory test), for example, compared to an AMD FX-60-based system which came in at about 6650 on PC Mark's system test.
Those are some impressive results, and they're in line with everything we've seen from Conroe so far. But those results come with a pile of caveats. This was Intel's event, so any benchmarks we could run would have come out of a lab setup by Intel. Furthermore, Intel chose the list of benchmarks installed on the machines.
While I don't believe Intel did anything fishy to the test PCs, I doubt they'd have chosen benchmarks that make their new chip look bad, either. Core 2 Duo chips feature tons of L2 cache memory, for example, usually 4MB shared between the two cores. Will tests that don't fit inside that cache and require frequent trips to main memory favor AMDs chips with their integrated memory controllers? I don't know that answer yet.
That's one of the many reasons we'll have to wait until we can run our own tests in our own lab before rendering our final verdict when Intel formally launches Core 2 Duo near the end of July. I'm looking forward to that day, though. Conroe looks like a very exciting chip. Tons of design changes went into boosting the speed of the Core architecture, and clearly the chip is much faster than Intel's current desktop offerings. At 65 Watts it consumes less power as well, which should allow system builders to produce smaller, quieter PCs.
We'll be hammering away at all the Conroe test systems we can get out hands on so we can bring you the full story on Conroe performance the minute Intel formally introduces the chip.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/002266.html
Today @ PC World
News, opinion, and links from the PC World staff.
See all Today @ PC World.
Conroe Performance Update
Posted by Eric Dahl
Wednesday, June 14, 2006, 04:54 PM (PST)
If you've been following the launch of Conroe--Intel's code-name for the Core 2 Duo desktop chips they'll be launching at the end of July--you've probably been all over the benchmarking data that's trickled out onto the web from as far back as spring IDF and as recently as last week. Well, Intel's Conroe benchmarking roadshow finally hit the West coast yesterday, and I took a trip down to Santa Clara to check it out.
Intel showed off 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo chips running a variety of approved benchmarks on systems with 1GB of RAM and pairs of ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire graphics boards. Performance was impressive--the Conroe system scored 7326 on the PC Mark system test (6683 on its CPU test and 5628 on the memory test), for example, compared to an AMD FX-60-based system which came in at about 6650 on PC Mark's system test.
Those are some impressive results, and they're in line with everything we've seen from Conroe so far. But those results come with a pile of caveats. This was Intel's event, so any benchmarks we could run would have come out of a lab setup by Intel. Furthermore, Intel chose the list of benchmarks installed on the machines.
While I don't believe Intel did anything fishy to the test PCs, I doubt they'd have chosen benchmarks that make their new chip look bad, either. Core 2 Duo chips feature tons of L2 cache memory, for example, usually 4MB shared between the two cores. Will tests that don't fit inside that cache and require frequent trips to main memory favor AMDs chips with their integrated memory controllers? I don't know that answer yet.
That's one of the many reasons we'll have to wait until we can run our own tests in our own lab before rendering our final verdict when Intel formally launches Core 2 Duo near the end of July. I'm looking forward to that day, though. Conroe looks like a very exciting chip. Tons of design changes went into boosting the speed of the Core architecture, and clearly the chip is much faster than Intel's current desktop offerings. At 65 Watts it consumes less power as well, which should allow system builders to produce smaller, quieter PCs.
We'll be hammering away at all the Conroe test systems we can get out hands on so we can bring you the full story on Conroe performance the minute Intel formally introduces the chip.
