Performance Comparison of Current Intel Core 2 CPUs 73
crazyeyes writes "Intel has way too many Core 2 processor models. No one really knows if it's worth paying $100 more for a Core 2 Quad, instead of a Core 2 Duo. And when tech websites start interjecting codenames like Wolfdale, Kentsfield and Yorkfield, you know the battle is lost. All we want is a simple guide on the REAL WORLD performance differences between the many Intel Core 2 processors. How do they perform in games like Crysis, 3D rendering software, video encoding software, etc.? Fortunately, there is such a guide — just simple comparisons of the relative performance of these CPUs."
Nvidia too? (Score:5, Insightful)
I went out and bought an 8600 card, only to find out later that a 7900 is actually faster (despite being lower model number and previous generation tech).
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Yeah, the lower end 8 series cards are real dogs. I wouldn't bother with any 8 series card under an 8800 GS/GT/GTS/GTX, as you pointed out, the 7 series cards are faster.
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Yeah, the lower end 8 series cards are real dogs. I wouldn't bother with any 8 series card under an 8800 GS/GT/GTS/GTX, as you pointed out, the 7 series cards are faster.
Depends which OS you are using. I find my GeForce 8500 GT works real nice under Ubuntu. Even ran Vista decently before changed the OS.
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I would say it is. I think the Crysis developers just didn't bother spending any time optimizing.
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From what I've seen, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards are the best bang-for-the-buck at the moment. I just recently upgraded from a pair of 7950 GT cards in SLI mode to a pair of 8800 GT cards.
(Enough of an upgrade that I'm now CPU-bound instead of GPU-bound. Oops.)
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Which is nearly as important as the number portion.
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Re:Nvidia too? (Score:5, Informative)
And not to be a complete dick, here's a handy chart for comparing graphics cards [tomshardware.com] across several games.
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The (mild) confusion brought by NVIDIA's naming scheme wouldn't be an issue if ATI's 9800 series was shoddy or unspectacular. But the cards are so good that many people still use them today.
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Not a real world comparison but it may be useful.
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And even a passing understanding of how their model numbers work should make it obvious that an 8600 isn't necessarily even as good as a 7900; yes, it's a newer generation (7 -> 8), but it's a much cheaper part (900 -> 600).
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regarding processor tech, spec numbers and model classes. But, it's quite a bit of reading.
A Geforce 7900 is a high end 7 Series while a 8600 is a (barely) midrange 8 Series.
The 8 series supports a higher Direct X and Shader model version.
Get a hint from Apple (Score:2)
Do we really need that many different types of CPUs anyway?
It's easy to understand "Core" vs "Core 2" (2nd version of Core), and "Solo", "Duo", "Quad" (number of cores). More than that though, and you're only confusing your customers.
Re:Get a hint from Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's not. The Core Duo is not based on the Core microarchitecture, the Core Duo is just 2 Pentium-Ms fused together and does not include 64-bit support. The Core 2 Duo is the first CPU to use the Core microarchitecture and includes 64-bit support.
Don't forget that the first Intel Quad didn't actually include Quad in the name, either. It was called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700.
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The Core Duo is not based on the Core microarchitecture, the Core Duo is just 2 Pentium-Ms fused together and does not include 64-bit support. The Core 2 Duo is the first CPU to use the Core microarchitecture and includes 64-bit support.
Where do you draw the line between incremental upgrades and new architectures? The Core 2 is not completely new, it's an updated and extended (as in "64-bit extensions") version of the Core, which is almost but not quite the same as Pentium M. Which in turn is basically a Pentium III with the frontend taken from Pentium 4.
Re:Get a hint from Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Core 2 was designed from the ground up (i.e. it isn't an updated Yonah/P-M), and incorporates ideas from both the Pentium-M design and the ill-fated Netburst architecture. The Core 2 execution unit is 4 issues wide unlike both Yonah/Netburst that were 3-issue cores. Core 2 is 64-bit across the board. It does single-cycle 128-bit SSE instructions. It has "macro-ops fusion" (the clever trick that combines a lot of "compare and jump" x86 instruction pairs into a single micro-op. It does memory-disambiguation to allow much more aggressive memory access reordering, etc. etc. Yes, it is logically a progression in the P6 family, but it was a very big jump architecturally. Ho hum.
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My thought process was:
"Core Duo" = 2 cores
"Core 2 Duo" = 2 * 2 = 4 cores
"Core 2 Quad" = 2 * 4 = 8 cores
I'm someone who is usually really into these sort of things and yet even I was confused by their cryptic product naming.
Product names too confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
Core 2 Extreme QX9650
Core 2 Quad Q9550
Core 2 Quad Q9450
Core 2 Duo E8500
Core 2 Duo E8400
Core 2 Duo E8300
Core 2 Duo E8200/E8190
Core 2 Extreme QX6850
Core 2 Extreme QX6800
Core 2 Extreme QX6700
Core 2 Quad Q6700
Core 2 Quad Q6600
Core 2 Duo E6850
Core 2 Duo E6750
Core 2 Duo E6600
Core 2 Duo E6550/E6540
Core 2 Duo E6420
Core 2 Duo E6320
Seriously, someone in the marketing department needs a swift kick in the ass.
Re:Product names too confusing (Score:5, Funny)
Core 2 Duo Twin Pair Double
Core 2 Extreme Quartet Pair Duplex
Core 2 Quad Twin Quartet II Deuce
Core 2 Trio Double Couplet Twin Duet
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And let's not even start with five cores. The "Pentium" brand does not need a revisitation as Pentio, even if it gives me an excuse to say Super Core 2 Twin Turbo EX plus Alpha Midnight Remix Advance, Ryu's Legacy Final Form.
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Ha ha, are you kidding? They most likely have got a raise.
I upgraded my machine for the first time in about 5 years, and I had to ask a LOT of questions before I found out that the Q6600 had the best price/performance ratio at the time. In the end, Toms Hardware charts of CPU comparisons was the simplest way to figure it out.
Any normal person who walks into a store will have absolutely no idea whether a Core 2 Duo E6850 is better
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Intel's naming is not confusing at all to anyone that should be looking at it to begin with, which is to say everything at least as intelligent as a spoon of yeast.
More benchmarks... (Score:2)
Different processors are faster for different tasks, and i would like to get the best price/performance relative to what i'm doing...
If i'm running purely 64bit code for instance, AMD cpus do quite well, but if i'm running heavy SSE based code Intel chips tend to perform a lot better.
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Run a few tests which show only a little diffrence between each cpu and then say we can see what difference dual or quad and sizes in cache bring?
Definitely not enough in depth for my taste in comparisons.
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Long story short, I didn't end up reading the article.
Barcelona performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone provide some elucidation for this topic?
jdb2
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The Core 2 is effectively wider than Barcelona. The Barcelona is very much like the K8 in the front end, with only 3 "complex", full-time instruction decoders. The Core 2 has three "simple" decoders, and one "complex" decoder, with macro-op fusion (possibly decoding 5 x86 instructions with Penryn). The Barcelona is only capable of dispatching 3 uops to the next stage of the pipeline, whereas the Core 2 can possibly dispatch 4 (5 if you count uop fusion).
Thanks for the info. I did know that the Barcelona was just an update of the K8 architecture, which, was an (significant) update of the K7 architecture.... you can see where this is going. AMD chose to take the road that results in continuous cruft buildup on the traveler -- exactly analogous to the bloatware road that Microsoft is on. They both lead to the same outcome: performance/capability hitting a brick wall because of the law of diminishing returns (or Amdahl's Law in AMD's case) and a need to creat
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Hmmmm.... I thought I remembered the expected ground-up rework being referred to as the "K8L" . I think I meant "K9". ( there is contradictory information regarding this )
jdb2
Intel publishes this---make your own graph (Score:5, Informative)
US Government regulations require that Intel publish performance numbers for all of their CPUs. See the following links for the relative performance of all of Intel's CPUs. Make your own graphs if you need a pretty picture.
Intel microprocessor export compliance metrics:
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Link [intel.com]
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The AMD export compliance specifications are a little easier to find on AMD's site than Intel's. Search AMD.com for "CTP calculations". CTPs (Composite Theoretical Performance) are a synthetic benchmark, but do show the relative performance of various CPUs.
Just use Passmark you fools (Score:2, Informative)
Almost every CPU compared. Now was that so hard?
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It's all academic anyway (Score:2)
I don't really see the point in this sort of study.
The games mentioned, particularly Crysis, are going to get limited by graphics cards rather than processors anyway beyond the very lowest level processors and the most simplistic in-game graphics settings.
Some of the processors overclock much better than others, and for anyone who's actually reading an article like this and going to do anything with the information, this is likely to be very relevant.
FWIW, it's only a few months since I put together m
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10 seconds pass as 1 second ticks in the game slow.
And I do have a 9450 with an 8800GTX running at 1920x1200
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The game is simulated on each peer, and the only thing exchanged over the network is the commands that each player gives to his units, and a check sum of the sim state to make sure it's synchronous.
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I guess I wasn't clear enough. These were AI's.
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Actually Supreme Commander is one of few games that is (can be) CPU-bound.
That's true, and it can be pretty bad. But at the times it gets CPU-bound, another 10% on the Hz count isn't going to help you. Using all four cores on my Q6600 sensibly instead of depending primarily on one of them would have helped a lot more! It's a shame, because a lot of the publicity when Supreme Commander came out was mentioning its ability to use multiple cores. I guess they just pass off some of the donkey work to a second core or something in practice, because they certainly don't use all four a
Interesting figures (Score:2)
Apples to apples no longer meaningful!?!? (Score:1)
All the stupid half-baked arguments about which was better overall when you are more interested in specific functions, all the production of half-useful benchmarks taken completely out of context to support the sa
Nobody knows? (Score:2)
7-zip compressing. Multimedia encoding. VC++ has an ever so awesome /MP [microsoft.com] switch. Windows threads getting previews for all your files in explorer. Heck, even Excel 2007 will thread your calculations behind the scenes.
Games may not make significant use of multi-core yet, but some other real-world things do. Quad core definitely makes an impact on my daily usage.
make -j2 (Score:2)
Overblown (Score:3, Funny)
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X is maximum socket count for CPU, tied with number of coherent HT links. I haven't seen Opteron servers with more than 8 sockets.
Y is generation. 3 is Barcelona (native quad).
ZZ is frequency number. It is increased by 100 or 200 MHz each two ticks.
For example:
2218 is 2.6 GHz; 2220 is 2.8 Ghz, 2222 is 3.0 GHz.
There are occasionaly two letters added: HE (High Efficiency) for CPU dissipating 68/75W, or SE
Utterly pointless. (Score:2)
BRILLIANCE!
Why not run tests for F@H or Distributed.net and show what beats what?
Oh yes. The mythical "ordinary load".
This article may as well have just run 3dMark and called it a day, their results being almost as meaningful.
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Would have like to seen price/performance ratios (Score:2)
Back when I was a kid... (Score:2)
I just purc
Real World Performance? (Score:2)
I think their benchmarks give too much weight to the quad core processors. It's still the case that most applications that people use don't really use more than two cores at once.