Cinebench
Longer bars are better
Half-life 2 Lost Coast
1024 x 768, default detail. Higher frame rates (longer bars) are better
Media processing
Times in seconds. Shorter bars are better
It's worth pointing out that Half-life 2 runs in a single thread, which is why dual- and quad-core Penryns yield the same score. Cinebench 9.5 does not support SSE 2 and above. Only the DivX test incorporated SSE 4 support.
In most - but not all - cases the 45nm quad-core shows a percentage lead well over that provided by the 13.7 per cent increase in clock speed.
While these numbers were provided by Intel, they were generated in tests observer by Register Hardware, though we didn't get to examine the systems' internals. CPU-Z confirmed the clock speeds.
Dual- and quad-core 'Penryn' CPUs benchmarked
COMMENTS
Unimpressive
Comparing quad core to quad core (the only fair comparison, because we don't know how the dual-core Conroe would compare to the QX6800 on these apps).
25% more FSB bandwidth (1333 MHz vs. 1066 MHz)
13.7% more clock rate (3.33 GHz vs. 2.93 GHz)
New SSE4 instructions
Differences in cache sizes are not known.
Except for one app (DivX 6), the typical speedup is 25%. I don't count the 3D Mark Pro Overall either, because it is probably very dependent on the graphics card.
So Intel is getting about 10% performance beyond clock. I wonder how much of this is the faster FSB, how much may be due to cache size differences, how much is SSE4, and how much are other microarchitectural improvements.
I would like to see benchmarks Penryn dual-core vs. the fastest dual-core Conroe.
I don't know how much more Intel will improve the performance, or if they will offer higher clock rates than 3.33 GHz, but in its Quad-Core form Penryn does not appear to offer any significant advantage over Barcelona.
I expect Intel will offer Penryn Xeons with very large caches to maximize performance.
2008 will be the year of the great quad-core parity.
Get ready for the price war.
