Quad Cores: Intel Kentsfield Preview

At this year's Spring IDF, before the launch of Intel's new Core 2 processors, in an unprecedented move (for Intel) we were allowed to benchmark the new Core 2 processor alongside an AMD system and publish benchmarks. While we've previewed Intel processors in the past before their launch, this was the first time we were able to test something this far in advance of its launch, with Intel's support, and also test a competing AMD part at Intel's own show. Previously, Intel would hardly even recognize that it had a competitor, but in the past year alone Intel's attitude towards competition has changed dramatically. The change in heart was also quite evident at this year's Fall IDF, where featuring competing AMD solutions on stage for performance comparisons was far from taboo.

Generally speaking, Intel had a lot of success with its early previews of the Core 2 processors. Readers could get a good idea of performance well before its launch and they could plan upgrades accordingly, and as it turned out, the final shipping performance of Core 2 CPUs was nothing short of impressive. With the November launch of its quad-core Kentsfield and Clovertown based processors quickly approaching, Intel offered members of the press a similar chance to take an early look at quad-core performance at IDF.

This time around there were only two systems, both of which were Intel based. There's no need for a reference AMD system since we've already determined that Intel's Core 2 Extreme processor is faster than anything AMD currently has to offer; what we're now interested in is how much of a performance improvement you can get from going to quad-core. Both systems were identically configured with 2GB of DDR2-800 running at 4-4-4-12 timings on an Intel BadAxe2 motherboard based on the 975X chipset.

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Unfortunately, we weren't very pleased with the benchmarking circumstances this time around. When we tested Core 2 at last IDF, we were able to run some of our own benchmarks and the benchmarks represented a reasonable subset of the performance tests we were already running in house. With Intel's quad-core setup, we were not able to run any of our own benchmarks and the majority of the tests we were able to run were of benchmarks we wouldn't normally use to begin with. While we could adjust settings and use some of our own demos/test configurations last time, this time we couldn't do anything other than click go and see the results generated in real time. There's no reason to believe that Intel did anything fishy, and the performance we saw agreed with internal performance testing of Kentsfield, but overall the time benchmarking at IDF was not all that useful.

Keep in mind that the benchmarks Intel selected to show off were specifically chosen to maximize the impact of four cores, and thus we're looking at a lot of significantly multi-threaded applications like 3dsmax. Realistically, the majority of tests in our normal CPU benchmark suite will not see a benefit from quad-core and thus the real purchase decision between dual and quad core is far more difficult to make than you'd think based on these numbers alone. At the same time, when your options at $999 are a 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 (dual-core) or a 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700, we'd generally recommend going for the latter if you're multitasking at all or plan on running any applications that are well threaded. Even games like Alan Wake and Unreal Tournament 2007 will be able to take advantage of the extra cores, and you can always overclock the processor to make up for the clock speed difference, but you can't enable more cores than you have.

With the stage set, let's take a look at the actual performance Kentsfield brings to the table.