AnandTech: The Penryn Preview - Part I: Wolfdale Performance

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The Penryn Preview - Part I: Wolfdale Performance

Date: August 21st, 2007
Topic: CPU & Chipset
Manufacturer: Intel
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi

Power Consumption

Obviously power consumption should go down thanks to Intel's cooler 45nm process. At idle (sitting at the desktop with no disk queue), the difference between our Conroe and Wolfdale systems is relatively small - a savings of only 3%:

Total System Power Consumption at Idle

Under load however (running our WME9 test) the total system power consumption gap increases to 12.6W:

Total System Power Consumption under Load

Wolfdale decreases total system power consumption by around 10% compared to Conroe.

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55 Comments - Last by Reynod, 892 days ago

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Yes! by GhandiInstinct, 903 days ago

quote:
Wolfdale is faster clock-for-clock, but keep in mind that you won't see Wolfdale until Q1 of next year and the performance advantage simply isn't great enough to justify delaying a purchase by 6+ months if you need a system now.

I love having an answer to the #1 question in my head for months.

Thank you AnandTech!

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RE: Yes! by GhandiInstinct, 903 days ago

Now I just need to figure out when and what to buy as my GFX Card.

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RE: Yes! by Owls, 902 days ago

is it me or did the first image just look like a bunch of penises?

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RE: Yes! by Epyon, 901 days ago

Its just you

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RE: Yes! by strikeback03, 901 days ago

Apparently not. See the dailytech link from johnsonx below.

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RE: Yes! by Lord Evermore, 898 days ago

If your wang looks so similar to those charts that you saw penis in the image, you might need to get some medical attention. Or join a circus.

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Opportunity for AMD? by Hippiekiller, 903 days ago

Im almost glad (almost) to see that the performance difference isnt that great. It would be interesting to see each company have similar performing parts.

My question is would similar performance lead to an even more aggressive price war then the one we have seen recently? Or, would each company just stop at a relatively higher price then we currently see, not willing to slash unless it has to in order to counter the others move.

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RE: Opportunity for AMD? by FujiT, 903 days ago

ok, Penryn is a die shrink with some tweaks. The average boost is 5% and that's not including the boost from SSE4 which pretty much results in a 100% boost in performance.

And the retail Penryns will probably overclock better. The initial stepping supposedly had some problems reaching the high clock speeds that Intel promised, but it's been said that the new stepping solved that problem.

With Penryn, the performance boost not only comes out from the IPC increase, but the performance in clock speed. It's supposed to top out at 4 GHz (according to Intel) and Nehalem is supposed to pick up where Penryn left off clock speed wise.

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RE: Opportunity for AMD? by duploxxx, 902 days ago

the IPC performance increase is minimal, when a program likes more cache it is faster, if not it is the same. these benches from anand show it.

we'll see how far it will go with penryn and GHZ, in Q1 2007 they were not sure if they were able to fit the 3,33GHZ into a 120W TDP !!!!

About you're future... if it said by intel then leave it here out of the comments to ne you are just a fanboy, Nehalem is still vaporware and you guys are already hyping it... memorycontroller and fast huge on die caches do not work together....!!!!!

@anand, what was the stepping of you're conroe versus wolfdale.

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RE: Opportunity for AMD? by fitten, 901 days ago