Intel's Conroe Resurfaces, Benchmarks Strong

MojoKid writes "Intel has been occasionally leaking performance results of their upcoming Core 2 Duo processor for the Desktop, code named Conroe. At this years IDF select members of the press were allowed to get hands-on access to test systems for benchmarking. Now, coincident with this week's Computex show in Taiwan, Intel has seen fit to show us just what their soon to be released CPU can do, yet again. Select press members got together with Intel in New York city for another round of testing with Conroe. HotHardware has a performance showcase posted with scores from a Core 2 Duo E6700 machine and a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition X6800. The results, compared against the backdrop of an overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 system, look very impressive indeed for Intel."

On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

These benchmarks were run on boxes that Intel built. Even the AMD box was built and configured by Intel. Trusting these benchmarks is abit like trusting a study funded by the oil industry claiming that global warming isn't real. There have been a good number of independant tests of the Conroe and these put the top of the line Conroe around 12% faster on average than a FX-62. The results from the Intel benchmarks show a much bigger performance delta, and to be quite honest, I don't trust them one bit. Somewhere around 15% is much more reasonable.

Osborne Effect

Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect [wikipedia.org]. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts. This has forced Intel to drop the prices of netburst (read: P4) parts through the floor to keep moving them. Intel is selling many parts at a loss, and they have more price cuts (up to 60%) planned for the 23rd of July. Conroe is a great chip, but it currently has bad yeilds and will not make up a significant portion of Intel's shipped CPUs until the end of this year. At that point, Conroe based chips will be 20% of production; you can only imagine how many will be available on launch, a whole 6 months earlier than that. Intel has a killer chip on their hands, but it will be along time before Intel is able to ship enough of these to do much to the market. In the mean time, Intel will continue to sell their old tech at a loss to clear out inventory and try to keep AMD from making more marketshare gains... I don't think it is going to work.

Re:When's this gonna stop?

I beg to differ. Intel and AMD pretty much own 90% of the PC/laptop market, and 90% of those boxes have Windows installed. The PC world revolves around these companies. Also, what do you mean "growup"? Did I make a poop joke?

Re:Yawn

What are you talking about? This is standard PR. Intel does it, AMD does it, ATI does it, nVidia does it...