Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
While we're still comparing to Socket-939 and only using RD480, it does seem very unlikely that AMD would be able to make up this much of a deficit with Socket-AM2 and RD580. With Conroe's performance advantage averaging over 20% it looks like Intel's confidence has been well placed.
Also keep in mind that we are over six months away from the actual launch of Conroe, performance can go up from where it is today. We also only looked at the 2.66GHz part, the Extreme Edition version of Conroe will most likely be clocked around 3.0GHz which will extend the performance advantage even further.
AMD still does have some time to surprise us with AM2, but from what we've seen today, they are going to have to do a lot of work to close this gap. We saw performance today in the two areas that we were most concerned about with Conroe: gaming and media encoding, and in both Intel greatly exceeded our expectations. Also remember that Conroe should be lower power than the AMD offering we compared it to, although we weren't able to measure power consumption at the wall in our brief time with the systems.
Going into IDF we expected to see a good showing from Conroe, but leaving IDF, well, now we just can't wait to have it.
More from the show as we get it...
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ninjit - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Explain how 1280x1024 is GPU limited on an ATI X1900 Cross-fire system (i.e. 2 cards)???Idiota!
radzio - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Media encoding tests (e.g. DivX) were not GPU-limited. Result ?Conroe 2.66MHZ is 30% faster than overclocked Athlon Fx60 (2.8MHz).....
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
532 Average FPS in F.E.A.R.?I'd sell my opteron right now if that were the case.
/typo notifier
Justin Case - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Unless your monitor happens to support a refresh rate of 532 Hz, it would be kind of useless. Not to mention that your eyes can't really tell the difference for anything above 120 fps or so (that's one of the reasons why no monitor bothers with refresh rates higher than that).sp1nfer - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Please cut the 'our eyes can't see more than <insert pointless number here>' bs. You have no concrete fact to prove it. Let me give you some: some games play smooth at 30fps but as they drop below 25, gameplay gets hindered.And please provide a link to the Hz:FPS ratio/link.
Having 500fps in a game with a processor and 300 with another clearly shows there is more room ahead for the 500fps processor even if you can't enjoy all of them.
Fenixgoon - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
See wht happens when Intel actually has to produce a good CPU?I'm no Intel fanboy, I go for what fits my budget. Of course, I can afford neither an A64 or a Conroe, but hopefully this will drive other CPU prices down on both sides.
flyck - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
p4 was also a good cpu. only not the best.looking @ those benchmarks i would have to say i'm pretty amazed by it. AMd might get 10% closer with AM2.... but i think they'll have a problem with there K8 like it is now. Well i think we are back in the days of northwood(800) vs XP. maybe a bit worse for amd, but we have to wait for 6 months to say that.
SLIM - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
WOW, Awesome performance. Can't wait to see the real reviews against the then current competition.PS: Please fix the average framerate graph for FEAR, last I checked average framerate was not usually 3x the maximum (or reverse the titles of the graphs or something).
goz314 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm sure the AMD cult and Intel naysayers will try to find something wrong with this initial impression of Conroe's performance, but for the time being it's nice to see the 800 pound gorilla "wake up" again.BrownTown - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm an Intel fan and I see stuff wrong with these benchmarks. Its just a litle bit of a stretch to see that much improvement on benchmarks set up by Intel and not suspect something fishy is going on.