Hardware Analysis - Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

BoT — 2006-07-13T15:41:29-05:00

i think these benchmarks are bogus. they should have just made benches for the conroe, not compare it to the athlon. why would you bench an engeneering model against an in store model. they should have tested it with the k8l engeneering model.

i think the conroe is definitlly a step in the right direction, i might even get one but i stay out of conversating about it until it gets here.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

DsL.Dilbert — 2006-07-13T14:27:43-05:00

Samb@s@n, it doesn't really matter if Intel takes the lower clockspeed route, in fact, it might work in their favour. One important reason why AMD has been able to run at lower clockspeeds is because of their thread count. So they can essentially work faster and more efficiently even if the Intel CPU's were clocked higher. In fact, this higher clock leads to higher consumption of power and a larger output of heat. An example of this "failure", or drastically high clockspeeds, would in the form of the ATi Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition. I know this is a graphics card and not a CPU, but I believe it still gets to the point. The X850XT PE at the time, was the best graphics card money could buy, beating out the nVidia 6800 by a hair. However, the X850XT had the core and memory clocked so high, it required two-slot cooling. When the 7800 came around in a one-slot configuration ATi was cleanly knocked off the hill.

If you wanted a visual representative of this, imagine that the CPUs are highways or interstates. The AMD CPU is a superhighway with 16 lanes with a maximum speed limit of 100km/h. The Intel CPU is also a superhighway, but it has only 8 lanes, and exiting and entering this highway is limited to one lane, where the AMD CPU has many more. The only advantage to this highway is that the Intel CPUs maximum speed limit is 120km/h or higher in some cases. As you can see, traffic congestion would be far worse in the Intel CPU highway than the AMD highway.

In conclusion, you can see that a lower clockspeed with a higher count of threads is not only faster because it can allow for more information to pass through but it consumes less power and produces far less heat. This is especially good for gamers because overclocking is better done on an AMD then Intel because you do not require an expensive cooling system and the fact that you are generally consuming less power anyway.

-DsL

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Gerritt — 2006-05-19T04:56:12-05:00

Wayne, your my new hero.
Equal opportunity destroyer!
Nothing except bad to say!
Easy to do.
Take a stand brother!
Gerritt

Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath

Wayne Bradford — 2006-05-10T21:15:22-05:00

If I ever want a good laugh, I come hear and read all the bulls**t!
I especially like the one where the cpu is hardly used in gaming unless the video card is overwhelmed. Hum?
No one knows (including me) if the tests regulated by Intel are legit or not, but you would think that some here have an inside track on the true skinny. I would like to think (read that word "like") that Intel at this point could hardly afford to screw this up. Also if I remember right, the production Conroe will have a higher front side buss (FSB), I could check, but that is hardly the point of this post. So keep that BS coming, It ranks right up there with Ron White.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Bitmap — 2006-04-14T17:19:21-05:00

Umm...Samb@s@n, have you read the AM2 article. AMD doesn't yet utilize DDR2. That' s been Intel's bag for quite some time.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

ian elliott — 2006-04-13T00:02:51-05:00

I think I'll be buying the Conroe when its released. INTEL is Back.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

SombaSan — 2006-04-04T05:20:15-05:00

>>I'm aware of that. Athlon 64's don't seem terribly DDR2 happy.<<

why wouldnt' they be? as long as they find a fair standard, which right now it would be DDR2 800. i mean we are aware that anything less than that DDR and the 939 single CPU's will outperform however once in the DDR 800 and beyond ball game both intel and AMd. will shoot mile stone ahead of the current gen.

u know the only thing that really bothers me is i wanted intel to keep pushing the Ghz ( just to see how far moore's law would take them )

Im am more upset that they went down to lower clock speeds for performances just like AMD's been doing from Day 1 instead of doing it there old way and find a new route. ( although that is impossible with our current set of technology) i predictied this a couple years ago and now im not happy with the result.

could it be because i know now the competition will acutually be serious this time and i cant bash intel that much anymore? Or am i parioniod that intel has now decided to bite there lip and follow the AMD sucess path in performance....

i dont really know i guess will have to wait and see.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Radomir Jordanovic — 2006-03-30T14:38:50-05:00

Bobby Phillipps Mar 23, 2006, 05:57 PM

Hey, no one's responded to this? The X2 series is supposed to be the only dual core mainstream set of processors. The FX-75 is a single core 2.8GHz processor. I was under the impression that an FX-59 or FX-60 was supposed to come out and run at 3GHz, but AMD released another processor under that nomenclature. The X2 series had gone up to 2.4GHz, and it was expected that an X2 5200 was supposed to come out that runs at 2.6GHz. However, this processor did come out, but it is now named the FX-60.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

GODWHEAT — 2006-03-30T12:04:00-05:00

soon we will be able to bench these new cpu's for ourselves.
can't wait.
The nature of the beast (internet) is that you can't just use results from one site.
when the common man gets to testing lookout.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Super XP — 2006-03-24T02:21:29-05:00

DDR400 is should be equivalent to DDR2-667. Due to the fact that the DDR400 runs on Ultra Low Latencies where as the DDR2-667 runs on Low Latencies.

Either way, the Conroe is Intel�s �Next Gen� CPU benchmarked against AMD�s current Gen FX-60. I still don�t like the FACT that they used the worst motherboard for the AMD, but anyway, let�s see what happens when they are released

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Bitmap — 2006-03-24T02:07:34-05:00

Touche

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

A_Pickle — 2006-03-24T00:47:28-05:00

I'm aware of that. Athlon 64's don't seem terribly DDR2 happy. From the initial benchmarks we've seen of Socket AM2 (a new CPU socket for the Athlon 64 that migrates it to DDR2), Athlon 64's paired with DDR-400 often defeat Athlon 64's with DDR2-667. DDR2 is a better technology to DDR, no question, but it's superiority comes in that it offers lower overall power consumption, while delivering roughly equal performance. In the case of Pentium 4's, memory bandwidth is a good thing and latencies are really irrelevant. In the case of Athlon 64's, memory bandwidth is also a good thing, but latencies affect Athlon 64's moreso than Pentiums.

Sources:
http://tinyurl.com/r4drh
http://tinyurl.com/my3ak
http://tinyurl.com/rxke3

-Pikl

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Bitmap — 2006-03-23T23:12:32-05:00

It's not the actual efficiency of DDR versus DDR2 i as talking about, but the clock speeds of the different RAM in each system. 400 MHz vs 667 MHz.

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

A_Pickle — 2006-03-23T23:01:04-05:00

DDR2 works in a different fashion than plain DDR. DDR2 isn't much better than DDR on the AMD platform, in fact DDR2 seems to have a detrimental of effect on it, as we've seen by pre-AM2 benchmarks. The big benefit of DDR2 over DDR is that DDR2 can offer equivalent transfer rates at higher memory clockspeeds, while consuming less overall power. DDR consumes 2.5v minimum, whilst DDR2 consumes 1.8v.

-Pikl

Re: Intel's Conroe, it's good, but don't hold your breath?

Bitmap — 2006-03-23T22:57:36-05:00

Wait a sec...I thought an AMD processor had the tag "X2" after the name to designate whether it was a dual core. Hmm... I talked to a few other people, they've said the same thing. I may be wrong, but that's what I've always thought. Either way, the rest of the benchmark wasn't fair. They could have at least backed down on the RAM on the Intel to DDR2 400.