It will take six months or so before we see Intel’s Westmere architecture in stores and the first processors will be called Clarkdale. As the first 32nm processors from Intel it is a highly attractive launch that we already know quite a bit about. Chinese hardware site it168 has managed to get a hold of a Clarkdale system, which it has tested and published an extensive preview of, where we get to follow the Clarkdale 3.06GHz processor battle against a Core 2 Duo E8400 3,00GHz PU.
Clarkdale sports two processor cores and could be considered the successor to Core 2 Duo with its newer Nehalem genes. Clarkdale has an integrated memory controller for dual DDR3-1333 channels, and HyperThreading support for up to four simultaneous threads.
The benchmarks presented by it168 paints a clear picture where memory bandwidth and theoretic CPU performance is on top compared to Core 2 Duo, which use an external memory controller and an older architecture.
Clarkdale also dominates Photoshop, file compression, video conversion and similar applications where the HyperThreading can help. In game tests were parallel CPU performance doesn’t matter as much the results are considerably closer together and the Core 2 Duo processor actually claims a victory or two.
Clarkdale with its 32nm technology draws less power than today’s processors and those who want to make use of the integrated graphics processor can further diet the electric bill. It also shows how to overclock the processor to 4GHz and how it maintains a low power consumption.
With a clock frequency at 3.06GHz this processor will launch in the Core i3 family and expected to be priced somewhere in the $150 region. In other words, on par with Core 2 Duo E8400 that was used for comparison.
Clarkdale will not appear before Q1 2010 but already the architecture looks to be in great shape. More information can be found in it168’s preview (Google translated).
