Higher Clock Speeds, No TLB Issues and Better Pricing: The New Phenom

Wolfy, How Fast Art Thou?

One of the first things we did when we got our hands on Intel's 45nm quad core parts was determine if they were any faster than the 65nm chips at the same frequency. It turns out that the performance difference wasn't huge, but the power savings at the (theoretically) same cost makes the move to 45nm a step forward.

We never did the same for the 45nm dual core (Wolfdale) parts, so here you go.

The new retail Wolfdale (45nm dual core) based CPUs come with a super low profile, very quiet heatsink:

The old heatsink (left), the new heatsink (right)

It's so cute

Intel is taking power and performance per watt more seriously now than ever before, you can expect its next designs (Nehalem and beyond) to be even more impressive in this regard.

The average performance increase for Intel's 45nm Wolfdale based Core 2 Duo is exactly 4%, which isn't quite as big as what we saw in the Q9300 vs. Q6600 comparison but still something. There are definite, tangible gains in some applications but we're mostly looking at single digital percentage improvements here.

Let's have a look at power:

Power improves, but not as much as the Q9300 did over the Q6600, partially because cache sizes have actually gone up in this case (4MB to 6MB) while they went down with the Q9300 (8MB to 6MB).

We're not expecting to see price parity between the 45nm and 65nm Core 2 Duos until Q3 of this year, waiting will obviously give you a faster, cooler running chip - but not necessarily by a huge amount.