Final Words

The performance picture with regards to Conroe hasn’t really changed all that much - on average we’re still seeing a bit over a 20% increase in performance over an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60.  While it’s worth noting that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, we really were not able to determine any cause for suspicion based on Intel’s setups.  The machines were as clean as they could get, with the BIOS oversight having no tangible impact on most performance. 

Believe it or not, Intel doesn't seem malicious in their intent. The AMD system could be better configured by using a RD580 based motherboard instead of a RD480 platform, but other than that there's not much else that can be done to improve the performance of the system Intel used. Obviously we're not going to rely on these initial benchmarks for our final take on Conroe, but the scores are extremely interesting to say the least.

Conroe is supposed to launch in Q3 of this year, and here we are at the end of Q1 with some fairly impressive performance numbers.  What could happen over the next quarter or so? 

AMD will be launching Socket-AM2 in Q2 of this year, which will bring about more memory bandwidth as well as lower power consumption thanks to the Energy Efficient CPUs that will ship on the platform.  We have yet to see whether or not real world performance will go up as a result of the move to DDR2, but it very well may. 

On the Intel front, there is a lot of time for performance optimization with regards to Conroe and its platforms.  It’s also worth noting that the 2.66GHz E6700 we previewed here is simply a high end mainstream part, it is not an Extreme Edition flavor of Conroe.  At 2.8 or 3.0GHz, a Conroe EE would offer even stronger performance than what we’ve seen here.