Intel’s next microarchitecture Nehalem is slated for Q4, with the launch of the high-end and performance segment Bloomfield core. Computex served us a lot more hands-on information and even benchmarks. Testing at Computex is hardly optimal and it hasn’t been easy translating the figures to something we could compare to today’s systems. Not saying that the benchmarks that has surfaced over at XtremeSystems are any easier to interpret. JCornell has published benchmarks with SuperPi, Cinebench and wPrime, which are established scene benchmarks and probably the easiest to compare systems with it at an early stage. Sisoft Sandra and Everest refused to start/crashed when he tried (hardware detection problems).
The benchmarks posted focus on the multithreading performance in wPrime and Cinebench, and overall they show an about 50% increase in performance, comparing Intel Bloomfield operating at 2.93GHz to Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 clocked at 2.93GHz. It also seems that at least two memory channels are working with this system, unlike previous benchmarks where only one channel has been active.
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wPrime 32M finishes in 9.218 seconds and 1024M in 288.937 seconds, while it scores 14184 points in Cinebench 10. A Yorkfield system needs about 13 seconds and 440 seconds to do the same, and would score about 10500 points in Cinebench. We’ve averaged out the numbers based on established data, but also because of the inconsistency in the different versions of the applications used to compare the two systems.
You can find the screenshots and benchmarks over at XtremeSystems.
