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
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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formulav8 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I was honestly hoping you would see that you Should try alittle harder to resist fanboyism. I see my attempt was futile. You well know I was right in what I said in my earlier post. But you are right, I should have just let you be. I will just leave it at that. Alot of these post reap of nothing but desperate fanboyism on both sides anyways. Off to the forums I go.Jason
Ozenmacher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I am not an AMD or Intel fanboy. I am simply a fan of competition. Competition is good for everyone. It lowers prices , and forces the competition to create better products. AMD fanboy's should all be rejoicing, even if they hate Intel. This is good for the consumer.Falloutboy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
this part sounds fishy also"They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves"
tbh the more I look at these numbers the more they seem a bit odd.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
As far as I could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. I won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but I couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups.
Take care,
Anand
Reflex - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Actually it would make a lot of sense for them to rig a demo and get a credible site like yours to report it when you consider the recent market share figures. They can make up any claim they want later on to explain lower performance than what you saw today(bad yields resulting in a disabled part of the core or lower clock speeds). All will be forgotten in six months anyways except for the hardcore fanboys, and they have thier minds made up regardless of this article.If this gets a few people to say "Wait until the new Intel chips arrive" it was well worth the potential backlash. I am NOT saying Intel cheated here, but I find the gains demonstrated to be very questionable. I'd be curious about if the games you benched are actually CPU bound in the first place, the gains seem too great to be simply CPU. Those tweaked graphics drivers could just as easily disable a couple pipelines when put on an AMD system. Why do they need to be tweaked to 'recognize' Conroe in the first place?
Just some thoughts. I'm not making any accusations, I'm just bringing up a few questions that hit me...
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
If done properly, 33% wider execution plus a better tuned core/architecture can easily account for the gains. There's no reason to really expect that these results are rigged. I mean, does anyone here honestly think that Intel made a goal of matching AMD's performance? Of course they're going to try and surpass them by a decent margin, and given enough engineers (Intel has that), time (Intel had that), money (yup).... This is pretty much what I expected to happen, give or take 5%.As someone else pointed out, Dothan and Yonah scores very well clock-for-clock against K8, and this is a better tuned, more powerful architecture. (Bleh... "Core"... NetBurst was better IMO as a name.) Yonah plus better SSE plus higher clockspeeds plus wider execution = Conroe. What did you think would happen?
This is not to say AMD can't close the gap, and who knows whether or not there are special Core optimizations in any of the applications. That said, Intel has always been way ahead in terms of getting out better compilers and optimizations.
gamara - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Was there no way to make the Media Player 9 encode more apples to apples with previous reviews? It was interesting to note that the previous review (FX60) had the WM9 in FPS, not encode time. Makes it tough to even compar vs a prior review.Ozenmacher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Wow, this is simply amazing. I honestly was not expecting such performance. Granted, we have to wait until we see a full suite of benchmarks (not done by Intel) before we come to conclusions, but this is amazing. I sure hope AMD has something up their sleeves for AM2, or we may be left waiting for something better (K9).Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
A new cpu interface isn't going to get 40% performace inceases.If Intel actually get's these out the door, they will be on top, period.
bob661 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Period my ass. You have the nerve to talk about AMD fanboi's? None of us really knows what AMD is up to nor do we have unbiased benchmarks from a reliable source to really make good judgements from. I say wait until Conroe AND socket AM2 appears in our hands before we decide who is the new king.