A brief German article centres on the cheapest of the upcoming quad core penryn processors from Intel, To see just how far the performance of the family Benjamin goes when working at no less than 3500 MHz. And what better opponent to compare it to than the Q6600?, you may say "the QX9770" is the best point of reference for top performance, and you would be right, so it's also included, as well as several AMD processors. They even find a "simulated 2300 MHz" Phenom X3 (?) among them.

If you consider this clock frequency to be "low", you should start looking elsewhere for a better overclock, because the Q9300 doesn't go much higher without losing stability. The lowest clocked Wolfdales also report a similar behavior in several tests conducted around the web, so Yorkfields made from them don't turn up to be very good.

In any case, why these Penryns don't go any higher than their 65nm Core 2 predecessors, you can make your argument in any way, and the article's authors wanted to show that the more modest of the Q9000 series could beat an extreme  processor that costs more than one thousand dollars. Of course it can, that's what overclocking is good for.

Link: PC Games Hardware.

 

It looks like the B3 will be the last "B" stepping the Barcelona core will get, and wherever Barcelona goes, Phenom can't be far behind. The "C" stepping will already be a part of the 45nm Shanghai core family, so everything should be in order to proceed with the next manufacturing process.

There were rumours, floating around, about the need for a fourth "B" stepping, which would indicate that the problem with the B2 wasn't over, but AMD has vigorously denied that. Let's rephrase that: it's confirmed that the B3 stepping doesn't suffer from any TLB bug.

Surely, by the time AMD begins selling their 45nm Phenoms, Intel will have solved their own "problems" with Penryn and we'll be able to buy them at sub-extreme prices. You can also buy a Phenom if you like them, of course.

Link: The Inquirer.

Not one, not two, not three... but a whole lot, and all of them at once. We've got laptop procesors, server processors, Quads and dual cores, whatever you like.

The dual core CPUs (Wolfdale) should be available already, as they were announced quite some time ago. Quads (Yorkfield), on the other hand, will be released in Q1, with no specific release date  (this was also known, but contrary to the initial announcement). This delay affects Xeons too, even though there aren't a lot of four layered server motherboards (the excuse given) around.

Price ranges will be held, with the Q9300 substituting the Q6600 and the E8200 (E8190) doing the same for the E6550, starting at the bottom of the list. Having desktop CPUs with a FSB of 333 MHz (x4), you will need a damned good board to fully squeeze them. Either that or you pay a little bit more for the Q9450 or the E8400.

At Vr-Zone they have a complete list with all the Intel microprocessors currently (or shortly) available. The six last columns are very interesting, as they tell us that a price cut will take place on the 20th of April. We're only talking about 10 or 20$ for a Celeron or a dual core, proportional to their low price, but the Q6700 is getting the same treatment the Q6600 had this summer: from 530 to 266$! Intel must have noticed nobody bought them. And speaking of the Q6600, you will get it for only 224$.

Link: AnandTech.

 

Not satisfied with their current 45nm processor line-up, the folks at Intel are starting to give us a glimpse of the following architecture and the models that will be out first. There'll be a test later so I hope your remembering all these new names - anybody getting their Nehalems mixed with their Havendales will be forced to buy AMD instead.

Nehalem will be among us this year (if no motherboard issues arise, if you know what I mean), and it won't be cheap with the most expensive Quad version of Nehalem - Bloomfield, or Bloominexpensive - set to break your wallets. Then, in the first quarter of 2009, Lynnfield will come, also with four cores, targeted at a market segment that wants performance (just not so badly). The dual core, Havendale, will be postponed for the second quarter of next year. Havendale will also have an integrated graphics unit for the entry level market in mind.

If we talk about laptops, the Quad (Clarkefield) and the dual core Auburndale will also debut in the first half of 2009. Auburndale will also have an IGP, but is nevertheless expected to suck less power than Penryn.

No mention at any time of a single Octal, serves us right for not buying AMD.

Link: DigiTimes.

 

The facts: Phenom doesn't clock very high, it's cheaper than a Core 2 Quad but has a lower performance. Now, if your aren't into overclocking, considering the 9500 can be found for less than $200, while the Q6600 still costs more than $250... how much of a performance penalty are you ready to accept? Let's not forget that the price difference won't go away because  AMD knows they can't ask as much for one of those, as Intel does for the Q6600.

Faced with these facts, it's interesting to compare both processors and the addition of the Core 2 Duo and the Athlon X2 will also illustrate the improvements of the K10.

The results are quite curious. Apart from games, the two real life applications end with something akin to a draw, while the synthetic ones give different champions. What they agree on (both Everest and Sandra), is in giving Phenom a lower bandwidth than that of the Athlon X2. Sandra could be explained because they aren't using SP1 for the last version, but what about Everest? So which one should you buy - we still say Intel all the way. Disagree? You know where to flame.

Link: Legion Hardware.

 

Continuing it's recently inaugurated new methodology for measuring PC power consumption, Tom's Hardware takes, this time, the most relevant Intel processors of the past few years to see just how well this so much marketed characteristic has evolved.

We all know that a Core 2 Duo (or a Core 2 Quad, for that matter) is much faster than a Pentium 4 or a Pentium D. We also know the data regarding it's power consumption, which is way better than that of the Netburst architecture, both at idle and under load. But, how do they fare under normal working conditions?

With the same motherboard, an Asus P5E3 Deluxe (X38), and two modules of 1 GB Crucial DDR3-1066 (CL 7-7-7-20 2T), they compare as much as four Intel processors: a Core 2 Duo E6850, a Core 2 Extreme QX6850, a Pentium D 830 amd a Pentium 4 630. All of them have a working frequency of 3 GHz, and while it was obvious that the single core 630 would be the worse one, it's quite noticeable the bad performance per wat the Pentium D shows here (only a 4% efficiency increase over the Pentium 4). The Core 2 Duo is more than 400% more efficient, and wins followed by the Quad (which losses a little bit of efficiency because of the two-dies-in-a-package desing).

Link: Tom's Hardware.

Tom's Hardware has dedicated an article to place the impact of the CPU, on the overall system power consumption, into a new perspective. They consider that if a system is noticeably faster than another one, it will complete tasks much quicker, so it will go back to its low-power idle state faster, requiring less power than a similarly efficient (slower) computer. This is a different approach to most reviews that deal with this issue, and one worth taking a look at.

The processors to be tested are known to be somewhat energy efficient: an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. SYSmark 2007 Preview is used to simulate typical user behavior, and to get an idea about maximum power consumption levels, 3DMark06 and PCMark05 are looped four times.

After running the SYSmark test for more than an hour, the difference in average power consumption was 26%, but the difference in total power required to complete the entire benchmark was 50%. That can be easily explained by the fact that the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ system took 14 minutes longer to complete the benchmark, while the Intel system was running idle during this time.

The test with 3DMark06 and PCMark05 gave a consumption of 339 Wh for the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 269 Wh for the Core 2 Duo E6400. The Intel system took 2:15 to complete this test, while the AMD system required less than 2:20, a small difference that pointed average power consumption as guilty for the total power consumption difference.

 

Little more than a month and the new Intel revision will be in stores. Despite the proximity of the launch date, there's no official word on pricing or naming conventions, which isn't the same as saying that hard working people can't collect all the information scattered so far. 

There will be more models available, but these are the ones "confirmed" for sale between November 12 and January 20. No doubts about the quad cores, but it's unknown if the cheapest dual core will be an 8200 at 2.66 Ghz with a price of $163 or if the inclusion of an 8300 model at 2.83 Ghz will bring it to an even lower price.

Source: Daily Tech.

 

It's been said before and now that we are getting closer to the anticipated date is still holding: we may see a 3 GHz Phenom early next year, if not at the end of 2007. Barcelona is already moving to it's B2 stepping and could therefore reach that mark relatively soon.

Realistically speaking, we'll get 2.6 or 2.8 Ghz, but let's not rule out the possibility of a low volume 3 Ghz chip. If not anything else, it would help keeping prices lower for the rest of the line.

You can track this story to TG Daily among other web sites.

 

Not everything will be Semprons and Celerons for those who don't need dual and quad cores, the Athlon 64 will continue to live on a little bit longer under the name "Athlon LE".

Currently, you can already pre-order one of those for $60-$70. But, what is exactly an Athlon LE? An Athlon 64 with one megabyte of L2 cache.

"It is likely that the new chips will be made using 90nm process technology and will be based on the familiar F3 core stepping, but this time their TDP will be reduced to 45W."

To begin with, we'll see an Athlon LE-1620 at 2.4 GHz and a 1600 at 2.2 GHz. The cache size will be 1 MB instead of the 512 KB more usual for Athlons these days, so it's unclear if they are disabling cores or resuming old habits.

Link: X-bit labs.