The Real Conroe Successor: Clarkdale & All You Need to Know about Westmere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 24, 2009 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Quad Core Performance From Two Cores?
Intel released some preliminary performance data on Clarkdale. This data wasn't run by us and is straight from Intel. It's normalized to a Core 2 Duo E8500 and also includes a Core 2 Quad Q9400. The systems used G45 graphics for the LGA-775 parts and Clarkdale on-package graphics for the LGA-1156 setup.
We don't usually look at SPEC CPU performance, but here are the results regardless:
You can see that thanks to a competitive clock speed, aggressive turbo modes and Hyper Threading the 3.33GHz Clarkdale outperforms both the Q9400 and the E8500.
3DMark Vantage is of course faster on the newer platform thanks to the on-package graphics:
The overall performance improvement is roughly 50% in 3DMark Vantage.
Memory bandwidth is clearly better thanks to Clarkdale's on-die dual-channel DDR3 memory controller.
PCMark Vantage also shows a huge performance advantage on Clarkdale, however Intel mentioned that a big portion of that are the AES-NI instructions on Clarkdale accelerating one of the tests.
We'll be testing Clarkdale for ourselves later this year. It seems that this potent dual core with Hyper Threading could be a good alternative to making the quad-core jump.
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Wolfpup - Friday, October 16, 2009 - link
Dual core CPUs in 2010, AFTER we've had quad core for three generations, and even have a fairly reasonably priced Core i7 in NOTEBOOKS now? Boooooring!cosminliteanu - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Hi,anybody know when Intel will add support for USB 3 and SATA 6 GB? And most important in which chipset/platform will be ?
Thanks.
NeBlackCat - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
Once again AMD will be getting my money as I'm not being forced to buy two motherboards to get the CPU that I want now (Clarkdale) and it's immediate successor.
I'm sure you're gutted.
SFNR1 - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
what PSU was being used?IKeelU - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
I hope that mini-ITX is < 100$. I'll finally be able to upgrade from my existing atom board and its measly 2 SATA ports.cjs150 - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
Exactly. Personally I am excited by this. I need to build a couple of things for the home network1. HTPC - this needs to be very very quiet. This new CPU and Mini ITX board looks spot on if (and it is a big if) Intel actually delivers on HD acceleration for both video and audio
2. Small home server to replace the ancient thing currently flogging its guts out. This looks close - low power is good but I have two big requirements. (a) standard PCI slot for my RAID card which is an 8 port SATA raid card (Broadcomm) which just works exactly as it should. (b) with all the HD streams 2 xGb ethernet ports would be nice to allow for future expansion (and yes I know it is overkill). Looks like the current minim-itx board fails on both
CrimsonFury - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - link
An 8 port SATA controller is very limited via standard PCI.Even a PCI-E x1 slot would double the bandwidth (x4 or or x8 would be better)
Just use one of the mini-ITX boards that has a PCI-E x16 slot and check a PCI-E sata controller in there.
Holy Smoke - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
Am I the only one who finds the tock-tick thingy retarded?It's the wrong sequence, dammit! It's like an army going 3-4-1-2 fer chrissakes!
2good2btrue - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
Okay, how is this the wrong sequence?They optimize the circuit design, from a known good/working design, then they optimize it at the smallest current size possible.
How is this retarded?
strikeback03 - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
I'd guess he is arguing that the tick should be the new microarchitecture, and the tock should be the shrink of that.