Intel's Penryn Benchmarked

Steve Kerrison writes "Intel's keen to show off its up-coming 45nm Penryn Core 2 CPU. HEXUS had some hands on time with the new processor to get an idea of how well it will perform once its released: 'Intel's new 45nm Penryn core adds more than just a clock and FSB hike, so much so that even a dual-core Penryn is able to beat out a quad-core QX6800 under certain circumstances.'"

which brings up a point...

[plasmacutter]

arent most app developers still working their way into SSE3? (for instance, mplayer only mentions sse2 in configuration and initialization, and from what i remember even macos intel doesnt fully utilize sse3)

what's the point of even trying for SSE3 or even SSE4 when theyll just plunk down SSE5 within the next 6 months..

Is this a laptop chip

[bcmm]

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Penryn is intended as a laptop processor.

Does it seem odd to anyone else for Intel to launch a new instruction set on a laptop CPU? Are portables that dominant these days?

Re:I really wanted to read that....

[Tom Womack]

Firefox NoScript is the answer to all this kind of stupidity; I think it's worth using Firefox for NoScript alone.

Also, remind your hosts file that intellitxt.com is a synonym for 127.0.0.1

Yes, this is depriving hexus of advertising revenue. If they want advertising revenue, they should produce adverts which do not deeply infuriate their readers. Intelligently-targetted intellitxt might be actually usable, but to have every occurence of 'computer' hyperlinked to Dell's store is of no use to anybody.

a review you can actually read

[Tom Womack]

www.anandtech.com has a presumably very similar review (since these are lists of benchmarks which the journalists observed being run by Intel on Intel-provided systems), and enough bandwidth that you can actually get through to it.

It's a little annoying that these chips require different voltage regulators from the ones on current motherboards, since the chipsets are the same and changing the motherboard adds £80, some hours of fuss and an inordinate number of screws to what should be a trivial CPU upgrade, whilst bare motherboards, and even motherboard+CPU pairs, don't seem to sell well on ebay.

Re:Poor AMD

[RockoTDF]

In a few years when everyone starts hitting the RAM ceiling for 32 bit CPUs, 64 bit will have to take off. Right now AMD has the lead on consumer priced 64 bit processors, as well as the patent on the x86_64 architecture which they have licensed to Intel. It is entirely possible that with the next mass jump (like to Pentiums 12 years ago) that a completely new architecture altogether will take over, although people love their legacy apps so much that x86_64 still has a good shot at it. But as we have seen with Apple and the PPC to Intel switch, Rosetta demonstrates that we have the technology to create good utilities to seamlessly run code for different architectures. We can't just add cores to x86_32 forever, we will need the RAM. Also, power consumption will come to bite us since (in theory) a 32 bit CPU is not as efficient as a 64 bit CPU, assuming the program code is truly optimized in 64 bit.

Re:Poor AMD

[tomstdenis]

There aren't a lot of applications which can truly take advantage of 64-bit integer registers. In fact, bignum math is about the only that really comes to mind.

What does matter is the address space. It isn't even the memory [as in physical memory], but virtual address space. As more and more mapped memory is used by applications like databases, it is nice to be able to just logically access it via a mmap.

For example, you can mmap a 10GB file to memory, then poke at it like you would a C array, even though you may only have 512MB in the system. That's something you just can't do in a 32-bit process even if you had the memory.

Tom

Re:I really wanted to read that....

[GIL_Dude]

Exactly. I didn't see any ads there at all and none of these text bombs people wrote about.

Re:

[u0berdev]

It's faster, yes. But I can't wait to see how much less power it uses. The main benefit I see from Intel moving to 45-nm should be getting speeds => Core2 but using less power. As everyone continues on the path to 'greener' tech, this will be one of the biggest selling factors for the Penryn family.

And let's not forget that when this comes out in '08, the Core2's will get even cheaper! Heck I'm still excited about the next price drop for the Core2's this 22nd (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdo c.aspx?i=2963&p=2 [anandtech.com]).

Re:Poor AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

"I find that statement laughable."

Ditto to your statement. Segments, 'extended memory', 'EMS', etc were necessary, but a bad idea. We all got a lot happyer when everything became 32-bit. Let's not make the same bad mistakes over and over again.