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
Two Cores, Four Threads
Clarkdale is the spiritual successor to Conroe - one of our favorite dual-core processors of all time. It's a dual core chip but with all of the magic of Nehalem. Meaning you get a 64KB L1 per core, 256KB L2 per core but only a 4MB L3 cache. Remember that the L3 cache is shared among all cores and Intel likes to keep the ratio at 2MB per core.
Each core is capable of executing two threads (Hyper Threading). There's of course going to be turbo mode, although the upside shouldn't be too huge on desktop Clarkdale processors.
A Clarkdale mini-ITX system
Clarkdale, like the rest of the Nehalem/Westmere family makes extensive use of clock gating. You also get a ~1M transistor PCU that is in charge of keeping power consumption at a minimum. The result is a chip that truly sips power:
69.8W under Cinebench load
Intel's Clarkdale mini-ITX system used less than 30W at idle and only 70W under load running Cinebench's multi-threaded test. The idle performance is particularly impressive - that's not too far off from an Ion system honestly, but with much better performance.
27.6W at idle
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MonkeyPaw - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Yeah, every new iteration of Intel graphics is always promised to be fully functional and competitive. Yet every time, they aren't. Their IGPs ship with stuff disabled or not supported by drivers. 3D is a joke thanks to what has to be a one-man driver team. 2D usually works great, but that was mastered that almost a decade ago. I really don't have high expectations of Larribee. From what I gather, it will require a 6 pin and an 8 pin power connector, and all Intel can do is show it raytracing QuakeWars. Raytracing is great, but developers are not going to abandon rasterization as long as game consoles use it!Camikazi - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
Intel BoxStation i3720, featuring Larrabee raytracing and i3 CPU, coming soon! That would take care of rasterization :PBen90 - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
Yea its fairly annoying; especially in the forums when people arnt the most educated that there is a difference...I would love to be the person at intel responsible for creating their tick/tock drawings, must be the easiest, most secure job in the world...
Intel: Drawing boy! we need another tick tock picture now!
Drawing boy: Howbout we put some overlapping semi-circles
Intel:Perfect! That will work for another 2 weeks
Griswold - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
What happened to the original tick-tock drawing boy? The one way back in 2006 who made that penis shaped tick-tock pattern - was he fired?kiwik - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
You mean these tick-tock drawings?http://tweakers.net/ext/i/1190631924.png">http://tweakers.net/ext/i/1190631924.png
VooDooAddict - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
He went to work for Disney.MadMan007 - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Pat Gaysinger decided to go to a different company.the zorro - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
these days the tic-toc seems more like a tic tac.AnnonymousCoward - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
hilariousmdbusa - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
the clarkdale processor includes nehelem and westmere features--that really clears things up for me.
The problem is that when we go to buy a pc all we see is a processor name--i7 , i5, blah blah