Intel Conroe

[gdogg]

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=95021

thats only at 2.4, poor amd, but lucky meh

anyway, who will be gettin one of these to overclock to unseen performance , cept with 7Ghz p4's lol

I heard, july release, if that true, Ill have mine, since its my bdady

all Ill need is

intel conroe 2.4 or higher

intel motherboard to support conroe, (nf5 I hope)

and that new patriot ddr2 667 3-3-3-?

maybe for conroe's they do an optimised sse4 firefox, lol as if its gonna need it will all that pwr.

Edited April 29, 2006 by gdogg

[boooggy]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Conroe-Processor...866351114QQrdZ1

[Scubar]

seen it before, not to bad i must say. if intel have finally managed to equal the old top end AMD chips then i cant wait to see what the new AMD chips are going to be like, man they are going to be blindingly fast.

[gdogg]

acutally, benchmarks see a maxium of 7% increase with the new amds.

intel might be having the crowns til K10 comes out or even longer.

[Albuquerque]

Yeah, the AM2 benchmarks have been quite disappointing in the recent days. There really isn't much new except for the support for faster DDR2 ram, which doesn't really seem to be helping them at all. I think I saw one individual application benchmark where it gained ~10% over the previous FX generation of the same speed, but nearly all the other benchmarks were no more than about 5% better.

In my opinion, AMD will not be able to compete with Conroe's raw processing capacity until next year. That doesn't mean they cannot compete with other technology choices, or lesser cost, or both.

Edited June 5, 2006 by Albuquerque

[Scubar]

I think AMD have used good business strategy, I have seen the AM2 chip benchmarks and they arent that much more impressive than the skt 939. The thing is, that all the money to be made will be in the mid range and even if Intel do come out with the conroe chip which well may be faster than the FX-60. people would rather buy the top range old 939 than a brand new conroe. Also AMD is still using 90nm process whereas Intel have had to go down to 65nm just to even try and compete. I have a feeling when AMD go down to 65nm you will soon see intel being put to shame again.

[Albuquerque]

First, I want to ask about this:

The thing is, that all the money to be made will be in the mid range and even if Intel do come out with the conroe chip which well may be faster than the FX-60. people would rather buy the top range old 939 than a brand new conroe.

Why do you think this? Any dual core S939 is still at or above $300 (I found a one-day sale on the x2 3800 for $297 + shipping at NewEgg) and would be handily spanked by a $250 Conroe part at 2.13ghz. If an FX-60 with the bigger cache and higher FSB can't keep up with a 2.4ghz Conroe, why do you think a more expensive A64 at 2ghz on an "old" socket layout is going to compete with a cheaper 2.13ghz Conroe on a new socket that will last longer?

Now, about this part:

Also AMD is still using 90nm process whereas Intel have had to go down to 65nm just to even try and compete. I have a feeling when AMD go down to 65nm you will soon see intel being put to shame again

I hope you really don't think lithography process (65nm, 90nm) has much to do with the actual processing performance of any processor. It surely makes the die smaller, which makes it cheaper to manufacture. It also can help somewhat with clock speeds, but they aren't going for uber clockspeeds anymore.

Conroe (and Merom) speed increases come from a redesign in how instructions are handled and processed. Intel spent a ton of time focusing on Instruction Level Parallelism, memory latency issues, ALU resources, macro- and micro-ops fusion (taking smaller instructions that might otherwise plug up individual ALU resources or break an OOO processing cycle and making them one bigger instruction that can complete much faster). These are the sorts of things that actually matter, versus just turning up the clockspeed and hoping lithography can keep up (which was Intels' prior methodology that sucked so bad with Prescott)

Now consider Intels' new focus on driving down power consumption... Their top of the line Core 2 Extreme (biggest and baddest Conroe they are going to release) has a TDP of 75W; the standard 2.4ghz Conroe will come in at 65W. This is almost half of the heat they're currently pumping with the PrescHOTts and ~40% less than the TDP of AMD's FX60 that the standard Conroe 2.4ghz beats thoroughly in performance.

Here's some helpful reading:

Anandtech's writeup

RealWorldTech's writeup

ArsTechnica's writeup

Edited June 6, 2006 by Albuquerque

[gdogg]

I know intel can afford lawsuits, if amd does reverse-HT , intel will have to too.

Edited July 17, 2006 by gdogg

[betamax]

So how is the new system working now that you got your Conroe? 3.6GHz? WOW... you must be at about 1600MHz FSB. Your RAM can take a FSB of 2132 if it is in dual channel. Just gotta push your mobo's clock from 400MHz to 533... it's only another 133MHz.

must.... go..... faster.....