Intel Core is the name of Intel’s new microprocessor architecture, earlier known as Conroe for the desktop market and Merom for the mobile market. We have during the day reported that Intel has revealed more detailed information about its new processor architecture, but it actually did a lot more than that during the first day of IDF. It has namely also displayed the first performance tests with the Core architecture and at Anandtech they’ve managed to come across Intel’s two test systems to do some tests of their own. The Core systems was based on Intel’s 975X chipset and use a 2.66GHz Conroe processor with a 1066MHz processor bus. The AMD system was a Athlon 64 FX-60-processor overlocked to 2.8GHz.
For the AMD platform the Socket 939 platform was used, which have been replaced by Socket AM2 when Intel Core arrives, which in turn makes it hard to do a direct comparison for several reasons. But it is still a very intresting comparison between the two that AMD most likely just wants to forget. Anandtech chose to test the systems with both games and multimedia encodning, where the first is usually a very strong area for Athlon 64. Despite that Intel’s Core architecture crushed the AMD systems with all tests ranging from 20% up to 40%(!), with games!
Considering that Intel supplied both systems you should perhaps be careful with concluding too much from this, despite that Anandtech couldn’t detect anything weird with the tests. But if this is an indication for what is about to come we are about to enter an autumn we haven’t seen in many, many years. Is Intel actually about to reclaim the performance throne?
