Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Preview from Taiwan
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on June 6, 2006 7:35 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Business Application Performance
We start off with Business Winstone 2004, a benchmark that has since been discontinued by VeriTest but one we continue to use because of the relevance of its results. Business Winstone doesn't generally vary all that much with CPU speed as the benchmark itself is quite I/O heavy. As you can see below, this doesn't stop the Core 2 Extreme X6800 from maintaining a healthy lead over the FX-62:
With a 17.5% performance advantage, the Core 2 Extreme starts off by performing very well in an area where the Pentium 4 could not: general business applications. The Pentium D would not only offer mediocre performance here, but also produce a lot of heat while doing it; Intel's Core architecture is a very different beast and the results here show it.
We turned to SYSMark 2004's Office Productivity suite for another look at office application performance, and the results were no less impressive:
Overall Office Productivity performance with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 is just over 26% faster than the identically configured FX-62. The breakdown of the OP suite is below, as you can see some individual tests are closer than others:
The Communication tests in particular are very close, but there's a strong possibility that is because of the I/O bound nature of those benchmarks. The Communication suite was great at showcasing hard disk performance, so it's not a surprise that it barely shows any performance difference between the two CPUs.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
134 Comments
View All Comments
munky - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
Good work on running some benches on a system not built by Intel. Conroe puts out impressive numbers, it may just live up to the hype when launched.xFlankerx - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
Perfectly in line with older performance figures. Conroe's looking like a surefire winner.PCSJEFF - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link
If you wanna test the CPU in games, why don't you use Grand Prix 4 and Everquest 2: those two games 3D engines use a lot more the CPU than the video card.Supa - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
In the original benchmark, if you still remember, the 20% performance advantage was achieved by E6700 (2.67) over 2.8 AMD.Now the new 20% advantage was achieved by X6800 (2.93) over 2.8 AMD.
Not quite the same 20%.
If anything, the tightening of memory latency (5-5-5-12 in this test) can only benefit AMD a bit more.
---
Gary Key - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
It benefits the Intel based system just as much. ;-)
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
Original benchmark: Using Crossfire X1900XTX to alleviate bottlenecks
Now: Single Geforce 7900GTX
If you see FEAR benchmarks you'll see it'll be better in real world gaming as there is bigger advantage in minimum frame rates. At IDF system there is bigger difference in max frame rates.
Carfax - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
Wow, the Core 2 is obviously bottlenecked by the single 7900 GTX O_O!!!Who'd have thought this would happen a few months ago?
peternelson - Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - link
Good point, when hardware permits, redo the test with TWO gpus in there and see if the same lead is evident.
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
The tightening of memory will benefit Core too.peternelson - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
And based on these performance figures,
a 4x4 board with TWO FX62 will vastly outperform a lonely Intel Conroe.
And for heavy I/O ie beating network and disk to death, Intel has not been shown to have the performance headroom. AMD I/O will scale nicely.
When Intel counter with quadcore, they will find their FSB even more limiting, at which point the wisdom of the Hypertransport approach will be evident.
Depends how quickly 4x4 comes to market (but said to be 2H2006)