The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530

Memory Performance - Not Very Nehalem

Let’s start at the obvious place, memory performance. Nehalem moved the memory controller on-die, but Clarkdale pushes it off again and over to an on-package 45nm graphics core.

To make matters worse, the on-package chipset is a derivative of the P45 lineage. It’s optimized for FSB architectures, not the QPI that connects the chipset to Clarkdale. Let’s look at the numbers first:

L1 and L2 cache latency is unchanged. Nehalem uses a 4-cycle L1 and a 10-cycle L2, and that’s exactly what we get with Clarkdale. L3 cache is a bit slower than the Core i7 975, which makes sense because the Core i5 661 has a lower un-core clock (2.40GHz vs. 2.66GHz for the high end Core i7s) Intel says that all Clarkdale Core i5s use the same 2.40GHz uncore clock, while the i3s run it at 2.13GHz and the Clarkdale Pentiums run it at 2.0GHz.

Here’s where things get disgusting. Memory latency is about 76% higher than on Lynnfield. That’s just abysmal. It’s also reflected in the memory bandwidth scores. While Lynnfield can manage over 15GB/s from its dual-channel memory controller, Clarkdale can’t break 10. Granted this is higher than the Core 2 platforms, but it’s not great.

What we’re looking at is a Nehalem-like CPU architecture coupled with a 45nm P45 chipset on-package. And it doesn’t look very good. If anything was going to hurt Clarkdale’s performance, it’d be memory latency.