The Real Conroe Successor: Clarkdale & All You Need to Know about Westmere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 24, 2009 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Quad Core Performance From Two Cores?
Intel released some preliminary performance data on Clarkdale. This data wasn't run by us and is straight from Intel. It's normalized to a Core 2 Duo E8500 and also includes a Core 2 Quad Q9400. The systems used G45 graphics for the LGA-775 parts and Clarkdale on-package graphics for the LGA-1156 setup.
We don't usually look at SPEC CPU performance, but here are the results regardless:
You can see that thanks to a competitive clock speed, aggressive turbo modes and Hyper Threading the 3.33GHz Clarkdale outperforms both the Q9400 and the E8500.
3DMark Vantage is of course faster on the newer platform thanks to the on-package graphics:
The overall performance improvement is roughly 50% in 3DMark Vantage.
Memory bandwidth is clearly better thanks to Clarkdale's on-die dual-channel DDR3 memory controller.
PCMark Vantage also shows a huge performance advantage on Clarkdale, however Intel mentioned that a big portion of that are the AES-NI instructions on Clarkdale accelerating one of the tests.
We'll be testing Clarkdale for ourselves later this year. It seems that this potent dual core with Hyper Threading could be a good alternative to making the quad-core jump.
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MonkeyPaw - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Yeah, every new iteration of Intel graphics is always promised to be fully functional and competitive. Yet every time, they aren't. Their IGPs ship with stuff disabled or not supported by drivers. 3D is a joke thanks to what has to be a one-man driver team. 2D usually works great, but that was mastered that almost a decade ago. I really don't have high expectations of Larribee. From what I gather, it will require a 6 pin and an 8 pin power connector, and all Intel can do is show it raytracing QuakeWars. Raytracing is great, but developers are not going to abandon rasterization as long as game consoles use it!Camikazi - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
Intel BoxStation i3720, featuring Larrabee raytracing and i3 CPU, coming soon! That would take care of rasterization :PBen90 - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
Yea its fairly annoying; especially in the forums when people arnt the most educated that there is a difference...I would love to be the person at intel responsible for creating their tick/tock drawings, must be the easiest, most secure job in the world...
Intel: Drawing boy! we need another tick tock picture now!
Drawing boy: Howbout we put some overlapping semi-circles
Intel:Perfect! That will work for another 2 weeks
Griswold - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
What happened to the original tick-tock drawing boy? The one way back in 2006 who made that penis shaped tick-tock pattern - was he fired?kiwik - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
You mean these tick-tock drawings?http://tweakers.net/ext/i/1190631924.png">http://tweakers.net/ext/i/1190631924.png
VooDooAddict - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
He went to work for Disney.MadMan007 - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Pat Gaysinger decided to go to a different company.the zorro - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
these days the tic-toc seems more like a tic tac.AnnonymousCoward - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
hilariousmdbusa - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
the clarkdale processor includes nehelem and westmere features--that really clears things up for me.
The problem is that when we go to buy a pc all we see is a processor name--i7 , i5, blah blah