Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 14, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 didn't lose a single benchmark in our comparison; not a single one. In many cases, the $183 Core 2 Duo E6300 actually outperformed Intel's previous champ: the Pentium Extreme Edition 965. In one day, Intel has made its entire Pentium D lineup of processors obsolete. Intel's Core 2 processors offer the sort of next-generation micro-architecture performance leap that we honestly haven't seen from Intel since the introduction of the P6.
Compared to AMD's Athlon 64 X2 the situation gets a lot more competitive, but AMD still doesn't stand a chance. The Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Duo E6700 and E6600 were pretty consistently in the top 3 or 4 spots in each benchmark, with the E6600 offering better performance than AMD's FX-62 flagship in the vast majority of benchmarks. Another way of looking at it is that Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600 is effectively a $316 FX-62, which doesn't sound bad at all.
We're still waiting to get our hands on the E6400 as it may end up being the best bang for your buck, but even the slower E6300 is quite competitive with AMD's X2 4200+ and X2 3800+. If AMD drops the price on those two parts even more than we're expecting, then it may be able to hold on to the lower end of the performance mainstream market as the E6300 is not nearly as fast as the E6600.
As impressed as we are with Intel's Core 2 processor lineup, we are still very concerned about availability and street pricing. To quote from our last Core 2 preview article:
While Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors will be released at the beginning of Q3 of this year it will take some time for all of Intel's shipments to be Conroe based. The scary statistic is that by the end of this year, only 25% of Intel's Performance Mainstream desktop processor shipments will be based on Conroe. The remaining 75% will still be NetBurst based, meaning they will be Pentium 4, Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition.
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For the Dells of the world, Conroe availability shouldn't be too much of an issue because companies like Dell get first dibs. For years of not going with AMD, all while demanding something more competitive from Intel, you better believe that Dell is going to soak up every last Conroe that it can.
The problem then becomes what happens after Dell and HP have eaten their lunch; unfortunately the concern is that aggressive pricing won't be enough to reduce retail demand for Conroe. What we're worried about happening is a very small supply of Conroes on the retail market in late Q3/early Q4, resulting in much higher street prices than what you see on page 2. In the worst case scenario for Intel, Conroe's limited retail availability could result in a price to performance ratio equal to or worse than AMD's Athlon 64 X2.
Despite pulling in the official launch date for Core 2 processor benchmarks, shipment dates for the CPUs haven't changed. According to Intel:
Intel Core 2 Extreme processor based systems and boxed product are expected to be available on the day of launch, 27 July. Intel Core 2 Duo processor based systems and boxed product [through places such as Newegg] are expected to be available from 7 August. Each OEM has their own product introduction / transition cycles based upon their target market segment and current product offerings. We expect some to offer product in August with more introductions extending through September. Check with the OEMs of your choice to get their specific message on system availability.
From what Intel is telling us, you shouldn't be able to so much as purchase Core 2 processors until after the first week in August, although you'll be able to get complete systems before then. At the same time, we're hearing that distributors already have some Core 2 parts in stock and will begin shipping very soon. While we tend to believe Intel's assessment of availability, we're hoping it's conservative.
If Intel's availability statements are true or even worse, overly optimistic, then don't expect to be upgrading to a Core 2 system anytime soon. However, if all goes well, although Vista may be delayed until 2007, Intel's Core 2 processors will give you a very good reason to upgrade this year.
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coldpower27 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Are there supposed to be there as they aren't functioning in Firefox 1.5.0.4coldpower27 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
You guys fixed it awesome.Orbs - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
On "The Test" page (I think page 2), you write:please look back at the following articles:
But then there are no links to the articles.
Anyway, Anand, great report! Very detailed with tons of benchmarks using a very interesting gaming configuration, and this review was the second one I read (so it was up pretty quickly). Thanks for not saccrificing quality just to get it online first, and again, great article.
Makes me want a Conroe!
Calin - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Great article, and thanks for a well done job. Conroe is everything Intel marketing machine shown it to be.stepz - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
The Core 2 doesn't have smaller emoty latency than K8. You're seeing the new advanced prefetcher in action. But don't just believe me, check with the SM2.0 author.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
That's what Intel's explanation implied as well, when they are working well the prefetchers remove the need for an on-die memory controller so long as you have an unsaturated FSB. Inevitably there will be cases where AMD is still faster (from a pure latency perspective), but it's tough to say how frequently that will happen.Take care,
Anand
stepz - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Excuse me. You state "Intel's Core 2 processors now offer even quicker memory access than AMD's Athlon 64 X2, without resorting to an on-die memory controller.". That is COMPLETELY wrong and misleading. (see: http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i...">http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i... )It would be really nice from journalistic integrity point of view and all that, if you posted a correction or atleast silently changed the article to not be spreading incorrect information.
Oh... and you really should have smelt something fishy when a memory controller suddenly halves its latency by changing the requestor.
stepz - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
To clarify. Yes the prefetching and espescially the speculative memory op reordering does wonders for realworld performance. But then let the real-world performance results speak for themselves. But please don't use broken synthetic tests. The advancements help to hide latency from applications that do real work. They don't reduce the actual latency of memory ops that that test was supposed to test. Given that the prefetcher figures out the access pattern of the latency test, the test is utterly meaningless in any context. The test doesn't do anything close to realworld, so if its main purpose is broken, it is utterly useless.JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Modified comments from a similar thread further down:Given that the prefetcher figures out the access pattern of the latency test, the test is utterly meaningless in any context."
That's only true if the prefetcher can't figure out access patterns for all other applications as well, and from the results I'm pretty sure it can. You have to remember, even with the memory latency of approximately 35 ns, that delay means the CPU now has about 100 cycles to go and find other stuff to do. At an instruction fetch rate of 4 instructions per cycle, that's a lot of untapped power. So, while it waits on main memory access one, it can be scanning the next accesses that are likely to take place and start queuing them up and priming the RAM. The net result is that you may never actually be able to measure latency higher than 35-40 ns or whatever.
The way I think of it is this: pipeline issues aside, a large portion of what allowed Athlon 64 to outperform NetBurst was reduced memory latency. Remember, Pentium 4 was easily able to outperform Athlon XP in the majority of benchmarks -- it just did so at higher clock speeds. (Don't *even* try to tell me that the Athlon XP 3200+ was as fast as a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz! LOL. The Athlon 64 3200+ on the other hand....) AMD boosted performance by about 25% by adding an integrated memory controller. Now Intel is faster at similar clock speeds, and although the 4-wide architectural design helps, not to mention 4MB shared L2, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to improve performance without improving memory latency -- not just in theory, but in actual practice. Looking at the benchmarks, I have to think that our memory latency scores are generally representative of what applications see.
If you have to engineer a synthetic application specifically to fool the advanced prefetcher and op reordering, what's the point? To demonstrate a "worst case" scenario that doesn't actually occur in practical use? In the end, memory latency is only one part of CPU/platform design. The Athlon FX-62 is 61.6% faster than the Pentium XE 965 in terms of latency, but that doesn't translate into a real world performance difference of anywhere near 60%. The X6800 is 19.3% faster in memory latency tests, and it comes out 10-35% faster in real world benchmarks, so again there's not an exact correlation. Latency is important to look at, but so is memory bandwidth and the rest of the architecture.
The proof is in the pudding, and right now the Core 2 pudding tastes very good. Nice design, Intel.
coldpower27 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
But why are you posting the Manchester core's die size?What about the Socket AM2 Windsor 2x512KB model which has a die size of 183mm2?