Conroe not that much faster?

[thegrommit]

I just want prices to fall a great deal. I wanted a dual core AMD chip for awhile, but by now it is to late since they moved to AM2 socket.

Says who?

Those prices seem better aligned to performance relative to Conroe.

 

[swaaye]

Did you guys see this:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/core2/index.x?pg=15

Now that is nothing short of phenomenal. Yikes! I wonder if SIMD will see more attention somehow because of this change in its performance?

 

[Mummy]

Sandra tests are worthless.

 

[Moloch]

Did you guys see this:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/core2/index.x?pg=15

Now that is nothing short of phenomenal. Yikes! I wonder if SIMD will see more attention somehow because of this change in its performance?

I'm with stupid... sandra tests don't mean shit.
The pentium 4 has been shown to superior to the A64 in that test for ages yet the reality is that isn't for most things.
Real word benchmarks> sandra

 

[swaaye]

It's a synthetic test that shows performance of an algorithm using SIMD optimizations. It isolates a specific area of the CPU. Core 2 is supposed to have the most robust SSE hardware of any CPU released, and I'd say what this test shows is indicative of that.

Of course we can't say this will directly translate to "games" or whatever. There are obviously other bottlenecks. But, it certainly does say that Conroe has the fastest SIMD implementation of any x86 CPU ever. At least using whichever SIMD instruction set this test uses. Mostly SSE2 I imagine. We're not talking a 10% gain here lol.

It could also explain a lot of the CPU's performance with media encoding, especially video. SSE2 gets lots of usage in video codecs and filters. P4 was good with video encoding as well, and was well ahead until recently.
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/core2/index.x?pg=9
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/cpu/intel-core2-duo-e6600.html
Oh look what happened here. Digit shows the slowest Core2 beating FX62 in their video encoding suite, lol.

And my favorite so far:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=113181&highlight=conroe Conroe just wipes the floor! They have some overclocked Yonahs and Dothans in there too. It is awfully tough to get 3.1 GHz out of a X2. You don't see that without serious cooling, almost certainly not air. And the Conroes in blue at top are all at stock clock!

I'm wondering just how much all that SIMD speed helps the overall picture with Core2. Athlon64 has never been known for an outstanding SIMD design, but it was ahead of P4 in many ways.

 

[chavvdarrr]

Slightly off-topic, but I am waiting for 64-bit benchmarks with Win XP x64 or Win Vista x64, just to see which CPU has better 64-bit performance.

See http://aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=120062277&forumid=1 and discussion there, also note http://aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=120062311&forumid=1 - on thread-frindly tasks with big memory footprint, K8 is still competative
basicly, Conroe can "lose" some performance in 64-bit mode, due to decreased effective cache size and some limitations in 64b mode. Better way to say it is perhaps that Conroe gains maybe a bit smaller than K8. Still should beat K8 in almost any desktop task.