Just like last year, Intel has revealed a whole lot of information about its coming processor architecture before it is even launched. In 2006 it was the Core architecture and Conroe that was previewed long before the official launch, and this time its Intel’s 45nm architecture Penryn that is in the center. Intel has namely presented a lot of fresh benchmarks with the new processor architecture and as we’ve reported this is a lot more than just a die-shrink. Intel says it has made several changes to the architecture to improve performance and in other words, Penryn will offer significantly better performance than the current 65nm Core 2 models at the same frequency.
During Intel Developer Forum, Intel unveiled a couple of Penryn-based systems and did some benchmarking. Just like when the Core 2 architecture was revealed all benchmarks was performed by Intel and the three systems were all identical, beside the processor.
There were two Penryn-based processors each working at 3.33GHz. One with dual cores and 6MB L2 cache and one with four cores and a total of 12MB L2 cache. These got a chance to show their muscles against a Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor, which with its 2.93GHz is the underdog. Intel refused to run the processors at the same frequency and this is most likely a way for Intel to present the frequency scaling of the 45nm technology, but at the same time makes it really hard to do a direct comparison. A couple of reports have surfaced where they all take a closer look at the performance we should be able to expect when Penryn arrive.
“Obviously we’ll reserve final judgments on Penryn for our official review of the CPU, but these initial results look very promising. We would expect to see clock for clock Penryn vs. Conroe improvements to be in the 5 – 10% range at minimum depending on the application. Factor in higher clock speeds and you can expect our CPU performance charts to shift up by about 20% by the end of this year.” – Anandtech
Penryn is looking mighty promising, but it remains to be seen when the first 45nm processors will appear, at the same time we have AMD that will reveal Barcelona soon.
Penryn performance previews:
:: Anandtech :: Bit-Tech :: Hot Hardware :: LegitReviews :: MadBoxPC (Eng) ::
