Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Preview: The Desktop Gets a 1333MHz FSB
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2007 2:57 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Tell it To Me Straight Anand: Is it Any faster?
The beauty of these FSB launches at equivalent clock speeds is that we show you a single chart that summarizes the performance impact of the faster FSB across our entire bench suite. At one single glance you can figure out whether or not there's anything worth getting excited about:
Overall, the 1333MHz FSB doesn't do much for dual core processors. Over the 20 benchmarks we sampled for this chart, the 1333MHz FSB gave us an average improvement of 1.9% over the 1066MHz FSB. There are two unique outliers in the chart: Oblivion with a 6.1% improvement and Photoshop CS3 with an 11.2% increase in performance. Both of these benchmarks are hand timed so the variance between runs is greater than normal, and we suspect that may be the reason for some of the larger than normal impact of the faster FSB but after multiple subsequent runs we were left with the same results.
Keep in mind the fundamental rules of FSB performance: clock speed, number of cores, memory bandwidth and microprocessor architecture all play important roles in the impact of a faster FSB. The clock speeds Intel is launching its 1333MHz FSB processors are basically the same ones that Intel first introduced the Core 2 at; we weren't FSB bottlenecked back then, thus there's no reason to expect a huge increase in performance by bumping the FSB today. Quad-core CPUs may see a performance boost, but we'll have to wait until later to find out exactly what that improvement would be; we have a feeling that the overall performance impact will be similarly unimpressive given the relatively limited number of desktop applications that can take full advantage of four cores.
As Intel ramps up clock speed and continues its transition to quad-core the 1333MHz FSB will be more important, but today it's by no means a necessary feature. There's a bigger performance impact from having more L2 cache (e.g. 4MB vs. 2MB) than from the 1333MHz FSB, which is great news for present day Core 2 owners.
Under load, the faster FSB also doesn't increase power consumption much at all:
An increase of 2W isn't much for a desktop platform, although Intel could arguably implement a variable speed FSB from its latest Centrino platform if power consumption ever becomes an issue.
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zsdersw - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
That's the P35 chipset. The article coldpower was pointing to is P965.. and he said modified his statement with "here", meaning "in the article mentioned".TA152H - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
So you think that's relevant? People are going to buy 1333 FSB for the P965???? Again, are you crazy? P965 doesn't even support 1333 officially. P35 is what's important.zsdersw - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
And besides.. the marginal improvement in overall system performance that P35 brings to the table doesn't prove or reliably suggest that Core 2 is particularly dependent on memory bandwidth or speed.TA152H - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
You're seriously confused.Most of the information out now shows that you get pretty good performance with higher performance memory running at high clock speeds, especially for DDR3. It's now becoming common knowledge. But, they test DDR2-800 for some reason. To really see the performance of 1333 FSB, they should be using it with the proper memory instead of obsolete memory running at inadequate clock speeds. Luckily, there is another site that promised to do that in the very near future. Why they couldn't figure that out here is a mystery to me though, it kind of hits one in the face.
zsdersw - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
That's the expectation: higher performance with memory running at higher speeds. None of that suggests that Core 2's performance hinges upon extracting more and more out of the memory/chipset, though.zsdersw - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
.. or, rather, that Core 2's performance depends on extracting more and more out of the memory/chipset.zsdersw - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
All I'm saying is that you're barking up the wrong tree. coldpower's reference was to the P965, and then you started talking about P35 as if it had something to do with the results of the P965. They're separate.TA152H - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
Are you unable to understand things in context?? Or are you arguing just to argue?The P965 is irrelevant, therefore his post is irrelevant, and therefore he has no point. The P965 doesn't matter for FSB 1333 processors, the P35 does.
My point was that they should be running memory at 1333 speeds, which means the P35. He brought up some nonsense that was irrelevant, and now you think that it was, and the P35 isn't. It's like the Twilight Zone.
coldpower27 - Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - link
No, my post is completely relevant, if your going to argue about official support on the P965 for 1.33GHZ FSB processors then DDR3-1333 is rejected to it being not officially supported by the P35 Express chipset, the only chipset to have official support for that is X38.If you need to prod others then I believe it's you who are the one that can't stand losing an argument.
zsdersw - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
An established chipset on which the Core 2 processors run is not irrelevant to the issue he was addressing: Core 2 performance vis-a-vis memory bandwidth/speed.