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Core 2 Extreme 40% faster than Pentium EE 965? 282

Posted by CowboyNeal from the chip-drag-strips dept.
Marc writes "As far as I know, this is the first time that Intel has talked about what we can expect from its new gaming CPU, Core 2 Extreme. For once, there is no word on power consumption on this new chip, but Intel talks about raw speed and a 40% gain over the current 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition 965 - which would be rather impressive and could indicate a problem for AMD. In this interview with TG Daily, Intel also claims that a Core 2 Extreme-based enthusiast PC will leave the pixel power of a Playstation 3 in the dust. Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!"
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Core 2 Extreme 40% faster than Pentium EE 965? More

Core 2 Extreme 40% faster than Pentium EE 965?

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  • Comparing apples and oranges (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Harry Balls ( 799916 ) * on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:33PM (#15313324)
    The demo system Intel is showing at E3 features a Core 2 Extreme processor, which, judging from past pricing strategy, will cost slightly over $1000, as well as a Quad-SLI graphics card (i.e. probably two dual Nvidia graphics cards at around $1000 each).
    Now, when you build such a high-end system you probably wouldn't skimp on the case ($200), motherboard ($200 & up), memory ($300 & up), power supply ($100 & up) and peripherals, either, so let's allow another grand for these things and you wind up with a $4000 PC.
    Put in a Blue-Ray drive (expected to cost around $1000 initially) and you just hit 5 grand.

    I'm not a Sony fanboy, not by a long shot, but comparing a 5 grand PC to a 1/2 grand PS/3 does seem a tad unfair, now doesn't it?
    And yes, a quad-SLI system with a Core 2 Extreme *is* expected to blow the doors off a PS/3. No surprise here.
    • From the article:

      "You'll [often] see 50 processes running on a PC today. So what we're finding is, all those background tasks can really be bothersome to someone when they're trying to game, because it interrupts them. So they'll turn all that off. The busiest gamers will get everything out of the Start Menu, every single thing off of their control bar, so they don't get interrupted. Well, dual-core helps that a lot. "

      LOL noob.
      I find that deleting stuff from my start menu gives me +10 fps.
      I cant wait ti
      • Okay ... I admit I'm not that familiar with the internals of Windows, and I also understand that (at least here on /.), Windows is widely seen as a product of programmers who were deprived of oxygen during critical stages of fetal development. But in what universe does having icons in your Start menu translate to having more running processes?

        That's like the people who think their computer is slow because they have too many icons on the desktop...
      • Perhaps he means the startup menu, which is a subitem in the start menu. A lot of cruft gets deposited there if you're not careful. And that's not even going into the services menu and futzing around in there. What the hell do svchost and csrss do anyway, and why did the need such letter-frugal names?

    • Re:Comparing apples and oranges (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "..but comparing a 5 grand PC to a 1/2 grand PS/3 does seem a tad unfair, now doesn't it"

      You've got it spot on. It is unfair now, but in 3 or 4 years time, you're going to be stuck with that same PS3 console in your lounge while the PC in your bedroom has evolved and moved on. More importantly, that PC has also got a lot cheaper, while Sony et al are still keeping the price disproportionately high to make money on their consoles.

      However, it is nice to see Intel getting their act together with their proce
    • To be fair, PS3's do cost a lot more than they sell for. They are a loss leader. I'm not saying you should buy that $900 number, but they are sold for at least some loss. And don't forget that computers can do more things and are upgradeable. but I 100% agree with you that console gaming is cheaper, and that this is an unfair comparison.

      • And don't forget that computers can do more things and are upgradeable.

        yes ... because if you're willing to spend $5000 on your computer, your more than willing to just replace the Quad-SLI card the next year, along with the CPU, and perhaps the motherboard and memory (perhaps the Core-3 slot isn't compatible and you want 4 cores on each die).

        So you're saving what? The case and powersupply? (assuming the PowerSupply still puts out enough power for your system and you don't have to upgrade).

        Yes, a computer

        • What I meant was that a PS 3 is gonna be exactly the same in 5 or 6 years (and neither MS or Sony intend to make a new console sooner). I could upgrade my computer 3 years from now (well, first I need a gaming rig). So if $5000 PCs beat the PS 3 now, a $1500 PC will beat a PS 3 pretty soon.

    • I'm not a Sony fanboy, not by a long shot, but comparing a 5 grand PC to a 1/2 grand PS/3 does seem a tad unfair, now doesn't it?

      First, $5K is your estimate, not Intel's. (Come on, $2K for graphics cards!? $1K for a Blu-Ray drive when you can't even buy PC software OR movies for Blu-Ray!?)

      Second, not everybody is terribly concerned about "performance per dollar"... they just want the best performance they can reasonably afford. I know my bike-racing brother's $4K ride is not 1/2 the weight of a $2K b

      • The point is there comparing a 500$ system with a 1000$ CPU. Now the system and CPU or worthless by them selves so they give the system a game and a TV and give the CPU a MB, Graphics card, Case, Monitor, Power Supply, RAM, Network Card, HDD etc...

        1 Vs. 1 the PS2's cell will CRUSH this Intel chip in raw FLOPS. But they can't run the same games etc... So they compare the graphics subsystem on the two systems. Now if you're Intel you're not going to build the rest of the system for 500$ your going to buy the
    • The demo system Intel is showing at E3 features a Core 2 Extreme processor, which, judging from past pricing strategy, will cost slightly over $1000, as well as a Quad-SLI graphics card (i.e. probably two dual Nvidia graphics cards at around $1000 each). Now, when you build such a high-end system you probably wouldn't skimp on the case ($200), motherboard ($200 & up), memory ($300 & up), power supply ($100 & up) and peripherals, either, so let's allow another grand for these things and you wind
    • Well, in all fairness to the pc side of things, the performance of the 5 grand ps3 isn't much better than the half grand one.

    • Re:Comparing apples and oranges (Score:4, Interesting)

      by iq in binary ( 305246 ) <iq_in_binary&hotmail,com> on Thursday May 11, 2006 @07:45PM (#15314193) Homepage

      Now, when you build such a high-end system you probably wouldn't skimp on the case ($200), motherboard ($200 & up), memory ($300 & up), power supply ($100 & up) and peripherals, either, so let's allow another grand for these things and you wind up with a $4000 PC.


      You're about half off on that price estimate there. If you're talking about not skimping, you'd be building on a server board that's SLI capable. This means 2 processors, quite possibly 4, if Asus gets off their ass. So add on another $1k just for the extra proc (3K if it's a 4 proc board), throw in the 12-24Gb worth of high-quality registered RAM, $1,800-$2,600. Then there's cooling, you have to go liquid cooled to maintain the heat all those watts are going to put out; figure another &400-$800 worth of water blocks, pumps, hoses, reservoirs, radiators and coolant. And last but not least, we can't forget optical drives, sound card and speakers, mic, camera, media card reader and a fan controller for the fans in your radiator, figure about $600 there.

      All this, and you still have to buy a monitor. Don't bother skimping on the 19", go for something with the native resolution you just paid $7-$12K to be able to handle, a 25" TFT with 8ms response time, $2500.

      You think home pc's are expensive? You haven't seen anything til you make a corporate workstation meant for research, CAD/CAM or compile heave applications. I've made workstations capable of 4.86 teraflops, sucking all 1000 watts out of the wall, handling a minimum of 85 fps or so playing F.E.A.R.

      "Not Skimping" are two words few people know about ;)

  • Of course they say that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rydia ( 556444 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:36PM (#15313339)
    Although one must wonder why AMD would be scared of a 5.2 gHz rather than a 3.7 when CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck. Seems like a lot of posturing.
    • 5.2 gHz WTF are you talking about?

      The Core 2 [wikipedia.org] Extreme processor is clocked at 3.34 GHz with a 1.34 GT/s FSB.
    • CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck.
      Even a routine task like compiling a program is cpu-bound. I recently upgraded my laptop from a 4200 RPM to a 7200 RPM drive. It can copy big files almost twice as fast, yet compiling is barely faster at all, because over 95% of the elapsed time is simply user CPU time. Same with video editing and compressing large files; they are very often NOT I/O bound.
      • Compiling a program might be routine for you and I, but it's not for most people.

        Games are usually video bound. Everything else normal people use their computers for tends to be user-bound.
        • As long as the user is able to perceive any response time, we are obviously not user-bound. It doesn't matter that the CPU is idle most of the time -- as long as we aren't smart enough to prefetch/precalc the effects of a command when the user has yet to click the button, we have a total and mad race to execute that command.
          • When was the last time you were typing an e-mail or scrolling a web page (I'll give you LOADING a web page, but that's not CPU) and the computer didn't keep up to you? That's probably at least 90% of time most regular users I know spend on their computers. That would be user-bound.

            Games are a notable exception (which I did note). A few people play with photographs and Photoshop filters complex enough to give a computer a bit of pause. I can't really think of anything else. As digital video gets more po
        • Maybe he uses Gentoo.
      • But those routine tasks can easily be parallelized. One or more multicore CPU could do the trick probably way cheaper.
        • Compiling separate independent source file to objs, yes. Linking and optimization over module borders, no. (Easy to parallelize.) The basic premise was anyway that the CPUs were not the bottleneck, when in fact they are.
      • Build times can be both memory and ALU intense. AMDs K8 core wins against Netburst on both counts.

        The reason netburst doesn't scale well is because the clock multiplier required to account for the loss in performance is not a simple 10% or 25%. In my last toorcon talk I compared an 540J to a 4200+. I found that while the 540 had a 1.45x clock advantage many algorithms took over 1.6x-2x more cycles (often with bignum routines 4x or more).

        So against a 2.2Ghz Athlon you'd need roughly a 4.4Ghz P4 with a hec

  • Summary Hype? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zephiria ( 941257 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:39PM (#15313364)
    I've read over the article albeit briefly and I find myself thinking that the quote in the summary is total hype for a chip, sure a PS3 will cost about 600, but I seem to recall those EE chips being as much if not more and given that this chip is newer then the P4ee's no doubt it will cost even more. And that's not counting the cost of video cards etc.

  • old axiom... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:42PM (#15313386)
    2 is always smaller than 3 - even for larger values of 2.

  • oh boy!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by lavaface ( 685630 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:43PM (#15313395) Homepage
    Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!"

    . . . until next year. : )

  • "in the dust" claims . . . (Score:5, Informative)

    by tubbtubb ( 781286 ) * on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:46PM (#15313416)
    The article summary states:
    "Intel also claims that a Core 2 Extreme-based enthusiast PC will leave the pixel power of a Playstation 3 in the dust.

    but then I also see in the article:
    "[I don't know off the top of my head] the number of polygons it can draw versus a Cell, but I think it's going to be higher, because there's a lot more bandwidth on the quad system than on the Cell system."

    That doesn't sound like much of a claim to me.

  • Only 40% increase? (Score:5, Funny)

    by joebok ( 457904 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:48PM (#15313430) Homepage Journal
    I would expect in actuality we would be seeing something like a 60-70% increase in speed. A company like Intel would probably estimate conservatively so as to not over-hype a new product.

    • Re:Only 40% increase? (Score:5, Funny)

      by SteveAyre ( 209812 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @06:18PM (#15313619)
      not over-hype a new product

      You're new to this planet, aren't you?

    • Re:Only 40% increase? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TCM ( 130219 )
      I know you joke, but the 40% are possibly even real. Conroe aka Core 2 is _seriously_ kicking ass. Check overclocking forums where people are pushing non-EE engineering samples beyond 3GHz on air cooling and break world records in most benchmarks, which were previously held by insane nitro-cooled P4 or Opteron setups.

      Conroe will be fun.

  • Anyone else starting to feel.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11, 2006 @05:50PM (#15313442)
    ..that using the word extreme should be illegal?

  • Sweet vaporware goodness! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ruiner13 ( 527499 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @06:10PM (#15313562) Homepage
    Since there are no benchmarks for either of them, isn't that a bit soon to say that? "Our unreleased product is 40% faster than your unreleased product?" Come on now!

    There's a bit more design elements going into a PS3 than just the raw pixel pushing. I still don't see many FPS games on a PC that can do let 4 players play on the same computer screen.

    • The Core 2 Extreme is the Conroe Extreme Edition we previously saw truncing a FX-60 overclocked pretty high. I mean, it's not out yet, but there's enough demonstrations and information to say that it's gonna exist, probably in about 6-8 weeks. This isn't vaporware, it's very-very-dense-fog-ware.
    • There's a bit more design elements going into a PS3 than just the raw pixel pushing. I still don't see many FPS games on a PC that can do let 4 players play on the same computer screen.

      How many PC gamers WANT to do that? Especially on a 17" monitor.

      -matthew
      • They made the comparison, not me. I have a gaming PC connected to my 50" DLP, the same TV I'll have the PS3 connected to should it come down in price a notch. I also want to make sure BlueRay doesn't end up shutting appliances off in your house that play un-DRMed stuff, while slapping your friends around for being in the room with music on without paying.

  • Trouble for AMD, I think not. (Score:5, Informative)

    by gerilart ( 825523 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @06:11PM (#15313569)
    AMD's Athlon 64 is 36% faster than Pentium 965 EE in UT2004 http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&m odel1=238&chart=71&model2=329 [tomshardware.com] Is Intel's new Core 2 Extreme only as fast as AMD's FX-57?
    • My 4200+ at 2.2Ghz would routinely beat out a 3.2Ghz Prescott during builds. I imagine the 2.6Ghz cores give the 3.6Ghz Intel parts a run for their money. I know for my pair of 885s I can get build times for various projects that is insanely fast compared to my 820.

      So that a new core from Intel is beating their crappy netburst core is not that surprising and not a problem for AMD [imho].

      Tom
    • I may be wrong, but it appears that benchmark was deliberately chosen out of a bias. The UT04 benchmark seems to run better on AMDs. When making comparisons of dissimilar architectures, no single test, nor any single type of test is suitable. While the AMD is faster at most of the other tests, most of them don't have nearly so much of a disparity.

  • just explain one thing to me ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by paulbd ( 118132 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @06:24PM (#15313661) Homepage
    given the investment that anyone makes in a computer system designed for gaming, how it is a "most exciting year" to be faced with the possibility of yet another set of continuing reasons to spend more money on yet more gear? wouldn't a really exciting year in gaming have nothing to do with new hardware and everything to do with cool, inspired and inspiring new games?

  • It's not only clock speed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blkmajik ( 3321 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @09:40PM (#15314784)
    Ok so the clock speed rocks. But does the rest of the system keep up? The big advantage I see with AMD is Hyper Transport and the newly ratified Hyper Transport 3.0. You can have a THz CPU but if you can't feed it data/instructions it's just going to waste most of it's potential.

    I'm not familiar with any possible new bus technology coming out with the new Intel CPU's, but based on my current experience with the latest Dell boxes (Intel) and our new Penguin Computing and HP AMD boxes Intel has a lot of catchup to do to outperform AMD and their whole architecture.

    We are using these boxes as MySQL database servers with each server containing 100+ 500 MB to 50 GB databases attached to fiber channel disk arrays. These boxes are mostly doing I/O, but a fair amount of CPU is used for sorting/math done at the database level. The AMD boxes smoke the Intel ones.

    Unless Intel also releases a whole new architecture that can compete with Hyper Transport the extra speed will most likely be wasted.

  • exciting indeed! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rhesuspieces00 ( 804354 ) on Friday May 12, 2006 @02:37AM (#15315890) Homepage
    I'm glad I'll finally be able to play solitaire at 800 FPS.

  • Gamers... ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jmke ( 776334 ) on Friday May 12, 2006 @02:40AM (#15315898) Homepage Journal
    "Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!" Games on the PC are for 99% of the time restricted by the video card, only in rare cases the CPU will actually be the bottleneck, if you run a game at higher details (AA/AF) and resolutions you will put more strain on the VGA card, and an increase in CPU power will not translate into a boost in performance worth mentioning.

  • I love competition (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mattnuzum ( 839319 ) on Friday May 12, 2006 @08:38AM (#15316862) Homepage
    I'm so glad that AMD became a powerful player in the desktop PC and server market... not because I love AMD but because now we are really seeing some earnest competition and innovation. Before, we were happy with Moore's law, but then AMD beat Intel to 1GHz and the ensuing struggle for mind and market share has brought about some truly phenominal changes.

    Keep up the excellent competition... maybe we can have a third player jump in with some new ideas? IBM? Sun? Let's see you what you have...

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