Penryn Performance at 3.33GHz in Beijing

Next up are Intel's Penryn benchmark results revealed at IDF Beijing. The system configuration is a little different, as both Penryn systems run at 3.33GHz and the systems are running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. The exact config is listed below:

And now the results:

For easier comparison we took the two quad-core chips (Yorkfield vs. Kentsfield) and looked at performance scaling between the two:

The Yorkfield system runs at a 13.6% higher clock speed than the Kentsfield system giving it an inherent advantage, but that's clearly not all that's making it faster. Half-Life 2 went up an expected 21.8% (we're assuming that Intel ran these numbers at 1024 x 768), and Cinebench saw a 25% increase in performance.

The DivX 6.6 test is particularly strong for Intel because it is using an early alpha version of DivX with support for SSE4. With SSE4 support, the quad-core Yorkfield processor ends up being more than 50% faster than Kentsfield, which bodes very well for Penryn if applications like DivX can bring SSE4 support in time for launch.

Final Words

Obviously we'll reserve final judgments on Penryn for our official review of the CPU, but these initial results look very promising. We would expect to see clock for clock Penryn vs. Conroe improvements to be in the 5 - 10% range at minimum depending on the application. Factor in higher clock speeds and you can expect our CPU performance charts to shift up by about 20% by the end of this year.

Intel has shown its cards, now it's time for AMD to respond with those long overdue Barcelona tests...