Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Entering 45nm

Conclusion

Intel for the Win...Again

At this point of time, it is a little hard to objectively compare Intel against anyone because they don't really have a competitor in a sense. Ever since Intel unleashed the Core microarchitecture unto the world, we've been waiting for AMD's response and even at this eve of AMD's supposed comeback with Phenom, Intel has to intervene to throw down another ace from their seemingly limitless bag of tricks, just for good measure. So, there will be no Penryn vs [insert AMD CPU here] comments as there is nothing to say that hasn't been already said since and no angle not explored. You'll have to just wait for Phenom to arrive like everybody else. Instead we'll just sum up what we've already seen from the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650.

There are two facets to the new 45nm core that have to be taken into consideration. Firstly, the whole Penryn family of processors is and will remain a minor 'refresh' to the year-old Conroe core from 65nm to 45nm and the anticipated architecture enhancements are welcome, but in general, the hasn't been any major changes to the Core microarchitecture to make the processor a significant upgrade if you already own a similar class Core 2 processor today.

Take processor performance for instance. From our benchmarks, the QX9650 is clearly partial to different types of applications, workloads and scenarios. We were able to see impressive performance gains that even exceed 10% in a clock to clock comparison in some, like Quake 4, Cinebench and DivX video encoding, but there were some that show little to no improvement at all. We suspect that the new and larger 24-way associative L2 cache plays a pivotal role in general performance gains, while the rest will require proper application optimization to realize the true potential of the CPU. The performance is there, SSE4 guarantees it, but whether your applications can take advantage of it is a different matter.

The second facet (and the most important) is performance/watt. This has been the rallying cry of the industry since power and heat have gone through the roof, no thanks to the Pentium 4 of course, but that's ancient history. Although the application performance gains of the QX9650 can be considered expected and in some cases, better than, the real star of the show is efficiency. If all the QX9650 was able to do was to perform 10% faster than the QX6850, we call it an upgrade. But if the QX9650 can perform 10% faster than the QX6850 while using 20% less power, that's value right there with a capital V. When Intel launched the Core microarchitecture, the Conroe took a whole 40% chunk off the Pressler XE's power consumption and the Penryn, from what we're seeing of the Yorkfield, seems set to cut it by another 20%. For what's is supposed to be the 'hot' Extreme edition processor, we couldn't really ask for more.

As always with new processor launches, the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 will find only a niche market and be bragging rights for the most hardcore of users. Still, it is a sweet, sweet taste of what's to come when the mainstream Wolfdale and Yorkfields hit the streets come first quarter 2008. Hold out on those upgrades, cause 45nm is here. Tick-tock, tick-tock.