Intel's Barcelona Killer?

[carmicael]

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quoted from: maximum pc (by Gordon Mah Ung)


Fastest scores are bolded. All three systems used an Asus GeForce 8800GTX card,
the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate, Intel D975XBXC2 boards,
Seagate 320GB Barracuda drives and 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800.

How do to you keep the hype boat going in your direction instead of suddenly tacking over to your competitor? You constantly beat the drum with tidbits of information to tease the public.

That’s what Intel is probably doing when it invited the media into its lair to preview two next-generation CPUs months more than half a year before they’re supposed to ship. Intel setup three machines with nearly identical hardware, drivers and benchmarks to give the public a glimpse of how fast Yorkdale and Wolfdale are.

Yorkdale is the desktop quad-core version of Penryn and Wolfdale is the dual-core version. Like Conroe and Kentsfield, the new 45nm chip is a native dual-core design with the quad configuration coming from joining two dual-cores at the front-side bus inside the heat spreader. Besides the obvious smaller 45nm process, the Penryn procs also sport a 50 percent larger L2 cache and 1,333MHz front-side bus. There’s also a raft of new features that we covered here.

For this preview, Intel used three machines, each with Asus GeForce 8800GTX cards, Intel D975XBX2 boards, 320GB Seagate Barracuda drives and 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 running at 5-5-5-15. The only difference, according to Intel, was a preproduction BIOS in the D975XBX2 board and a voltage modification to allow the board to run Penryn procs.

The Core 2 Quad QX6800 was running at 2.93GHz on a 1,066MHz FSB while the pair of Penryns were running at 3.33GHz on a 1,333MHz FSB. Intel hasn’t said exactly what clock speeds Penryn will ship at, only a nebulous “3GHz+.”

All of the machines were running the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. We were allowed to poke around the machines all we wanted but we were not allowed to install our own benchmarks. Obviously, these types of “previews” should be taken with a bucket of salt, but Intel’s selection of benchmarks and the fact that a similar test with Conroe last summer was justified by shipping chips gives it more credibility.

Several of the benchmarks Intel used aren’t new: 3DMark06, Cinebench 9.5, Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and the Mainconcept H.264 encoder. Others were alpha or beta builds of newer benchmarks including a beta version of Cinebench 10 and an alpha build of Divx 6.6 using VirtualDub 1.71. Intel says Cinebench 10 scales better with multi-core and Divx 6.6 was singled out for its early adoption of SSE4. SSE4 is exclusive to the new Penryn cores but Intel said the Divx demonstration helps illustrate that SSE4 is no mere instruction set. Designed to increase encoding, it can reduce half page of code into a single line of code.

The Upshot
The upshot is that Penryn is shaping up to be the fastest desktop chip in town. It’s easily 20 percent to 111 percent faster than the current fastest chip: the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800 and Intel says it has months to tune it still.

AMD says that its quad-core chip, codenamed Barcelona for Opterons and Agena FX for QuadFX, is still on the roadmap for later this summer. The company has previously said that Barcelona is 40 percent faster than the fastest available Xeon but Intel counters that its 3GHz Xeon X5365 wasn’t available when AMD made the announcement. (To date, the Xeon X5365 has only been adopted by Apple. That’s led to speculation by Apple fanboys that Intel is giving the vendor an exclusive. When asked by Maximum PC whether there was an exclusive, Intel officials told the magazine that was not true. The only reason Apple is the first to announce support for the faster Xeon is that Apple is the only vendor to adopt it thus far.)

Officially, Penryn chips are scheduled to go into volume production at the end of this year with retail availability set for the first of the year but it's clear from Intel's posturing that it can turn the knob to "on" much, much sooner if it wanted to.

[Teban2006]

I dont think so ,,, A leaked news just today on AMD's single core Barcelona overclocked to 3GHZ with 4Gig RAM, Window Vista Ultimate 32bit, OC Crossfire 2900XT hit a 30K score on 3Dmark06. If that is indeed true we will know that at the official lunch this September 10. And that score really will make Kentsfield, Yorkfield, and Wolfdale eat dirt,,hehehe If?,,, the leak is true. Then intel badly needs Nehalem for an emergency landing ay,, este rescue.

[spookey]

sakto jud bro!!! kamang jud ang intel ani sa yuta kung matinuod man gani. pila na pud kaha ka design sa intel ang mahimo before maapsan ang AMD... we all know the history of the processors... and usually history repeats itself... hehehehe...
watch and learn na lang ta ani...

[[DSX]]

unsa may settings sa 3dmark 06? basin dili sila pareho. take leaked news with a pinch of salt. until the real hardware is released we'll never know what happens.

[fish]

I dont think so ,,, A leaked news just today on AMD's single core Barcelona overclocked to 3GHZ with 4Gig RAM, Window Vista Ultimate 32bit, OC Crossfire 2900XT hit a 30K score on 3Dmark06. If that is indeed true we will know that at the official lunch this September 10. And that score really will make Kentsfield, Yorkfield, and Wolfdale eat dirt,,hehehe If?,,, the leak is true. Then intel badly needs Nehalem for an emergency landing ay,, este rescue.

di to tinuod bro... sa the inquirer to gikan nga balita. according to kyle bennett from HardOCP... inflated daw to nga result ang 30,000 3dmark06 result by 30% to 35%. just do the math... kabalo na na ang mga writers sa dagan sa barcelona, but dili pa lang gyud nila i-disclose ang benchmarks kay naa silay non disclosure agreement with AMD.

30% of 30,000 is 9,000... so that would be just 21,000...

[vladmire]

even if intel wins the race, AMD parin ako. i love AMD and im planning to build my last rig w/ AMD at full resources though next year nga lang.. pahinga na cguro ako sa mga pc, malapit ng lumaki c junior^_^..

[Teban2006]

Dili diay tanuod bai fish patay 9 days to go mag party na ang intel ani,,,hehehe ug ang core 2 dou mo mahal nag samot,,ering kitay louy ani..,,,,


Edit lng: Taympa gani fish 21K lng diay pero daku gihapon awa ng naas taas c Penroy este Penryn unsi mil raman ang 3D2006 dili noon guro na SLI buy GTX pud nga setup and 3.3GHZ ang proc, against OC 3GHZ barcelona. Fish kadtong single core daw ang barcelona nga gi sulti sa inquirer burit pud ba to?hehehe

[fish]

Dili diay tanuod bai fish patay 9 days to go mag party na ang intel ani,,,hehehe ug ang core 2 dou mo mahal nag samot,,ering kitay louy ani..,,,,

dili man sad na pasabot bro, nga momahal ang intel... i think... competitive ang barcelona sa intel nga line up. siguradong momahal ang intel processors kung mag-sira ang AMD.... kay nalugi

[[DSX]]

heheh mga istorya gani gikan inquirer... ayay i consider nga fact. mura na sila tabloid .. naay sakto naay sayop

[Teban2006]

Hehehe pero mas ma happy pa gyud tang mga consumer bai fish ug ma finishingtouch unta sa AMD ang Intel,,kay mas mobarato pa gyud ang C2D.

DSX what if ma sakto sa?,,simbako ipalayo,,hahaha