Introduction:
An Introduction is usually intended to introduce (hence the name) something to a reader. In bocks the introduction usually brings the hero into the picture and often gives us a glimpse of the villain.
In reviews and evaluations the Introduction is used as a means of introducing a product or manufacturer. Since Intel really needs no introduction and the QX9650 (Yorkfield) has been talked about at length I think that we can safely skip both of these requirements and move directly into what you really want to know.
How fast is Intel’s newest Extreme Quad Core CPU?
{mospagebreak title=What’s New}
What’s new?
Besides the obvious 45nm die shrink and the 12MB of cache the Yorkfield has a few new tricks up its sleeve.
High-K Metal Gate:
This nice little trick enables Intel to reduce the amount of power needed to switch the transistors from one state to the other while reducing the amount of power leaked. It also reduces the amount of oxide leakage that CPUs traditionally leak during operation.
Next on the list is SSE4. This latest edition to Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions promises even more performance gains with the addition of support for two different vectored 32-bit integer
Multiply operations, 8-bit unsigned min/max operations and 16-bit and 32-bit signed and unsigned versions. All of this goes into improved performance in video encoding, 3D content creation, and streaming load instructions.
As mentioned about the Penryn will have a much larger version of the Advanced Smart Cache seen on the previous versions jumping up from 8MB to 12MB. They have also included an enhanced cache line split loads capability. This helps when data is on two separate lines in cache, what happens is that the split load function speculatively dispatches the split lines of Data ahead of other loads to speed up the read of the split lines of data.
The Penryn will also see improvements in Virtual Machine performance.
Now this list above is not all that is new in the Penryn, but it gives you an idea that this new line is more than a simple refresh.
{mospagebreak title=Power}
Power:
Intel CPUs have traditionally been more power hungry than their AMD counterparts. However with the introduction of Hi-k and 45nm processes the new line should offer a better performance per watt point.
The QX9650 that was sent out defaults to 1.25v at stock speeds, this is a very decent reduction over the 1.35v of the 6850
{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
This is what most people read a review for, the performance numbers. So with that in mind we plugged the Penryn into a GA-P35-DS4 and threw our usual battery of tests. The results were very telling indeed.
3DMark06:
Here it is for all of you numbers people. I included both the total score and the CPU score to show the difference in performance of QX9650 when handling AI and other CPU based calculations.
As you can see while the CPU showed a 10-12% improvement the overall improvement in 3DMark06 was roughly 3%. This goes along with what I have been saying about gaming lately. Unless the game developers pull a rabbit out of their hat games will remain GPU bound for a long time.
PCMark Vantage:
Another Synthetic from FutureMark this suite does seem to give a good overall performance picture of a given system. But as with all synthetic testing it cannot really show what you will see when a system is put to actual use.
Here we begin to see the advantages of the 12MB of Smart Cache and SSE4 in 64 bit. While the usual performance lead was 6% when running the 64 bit version of Vantage the lead widens to just over 10%.
This is all at the same clock speed.
SuperPi:
Another test that is used by the numbers crowd, SuperPi, is a good test to see how well your CPU, Memory, and HDD perform together.
The Yorkfiled, with its 12MB of Cache performs exceptionally well since many of the calculations can be done right in Cache.
Video Encoding:
For my encoding tests I used AutoGK version 4.5 and a Home Made DVD with video clips I have shot over the years.
SSE4 rears its head again, as we see quite a nice drop in encoding times.
CineBench:
CineBench is a 3D content creation benchmark that tests your systems ability to handle 3d animation.
For my testing here I used the two CPU tests; one is designed to test a single CPU or Core in your system and the other for Multiple Cores or CPUs.
With its extra Cache and SSE4 the Yorkfiled walks away with this test as well.
POVRay:
POVRay is another 3D Graphics application that has its own built in Benchmark for testing your system.
This includes a stock graphic for rendering and can be run on one CPU or all CPUs.
For my testing here I ran the benchmark on all CPU cores.
Not much to say here but the Yorkfiled wins again.
{mospagebreak title=Performance Gaming}
Gaming:
The games below were all chosen because they are supposed to be Multi CPU/Core aware and can take advantage of them.
BIOShock:
A great game from Through the Looking Glass studios, these are the same people that brought us System Shock and the Thief series.
The graphics in BIOShock are a little cartoonish (Despite being DX10) and the enemies, although fast and hard to hit, are not very smart. It is still a very enjoyable game.
Time Shift:
Time Shift is a fun game where you are immersed in a struggle to restore future history to what it should be.
Here is another game with very cartoonish graphics but unlike BIOShock the enemies are more challenging and work in teams to kill you.
HalfLife 2 Portal:
Portal is one of the most amazing short games to come out. This is not surprising since it is a brain child of the people over at Valve. Ever since the first HalfLife hit and put you into the Hazard Suit of Dr Gordon Freeman Valve has been putting out one hit after another.
In Portal there is no real enemy AI but a significant amount of physics, particle effects, and of course the portals themselves. These items are real time tunnels to different areas on the map and when using a map editor are even able to link between maps.
Crysis (Demo):
Brought to you by the same people that wrote FarCry, Crysis is a visually immersive game with many amazing graphical effects. Lurking behind all of this is a monster of an AI engine and one of the most all encompassing environment mapping systems.
What this means is that you can interact with just about everything in the game; from shooting out a tire on a moving vehicle to blowing up the gas can strapped to its back. Your shots have different effects on different surfaces or different parts of your enemy’s bodies. Although the environment mapping is present and operational in the Demo, the AI was a disappointment I imagine that the full game does this better.
What can I say, the performance of the Penryn was roughly 20% better than the Yorkfield this is a pretty nice jump when you consider it is the same clock speed and has the same FSB.
The one place, as many of you have come to find out, where you are not really going to see performance increases is in gaming. Even with the resolution turned down there was very little performance difference. Until the game developers start writing games to truly take advantage of a Multi-Core CPU we can expect gaming to be GPU limited for some time.
This is even with games that brag about Multi-Core support like Crysis.
But in applications that require multi-threading and in multitasking the QX9650 rises above the rest.
{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The pricing is about what you would expect from the top of the line Intel CPU and comes in at a hefty $1100.00 US it will make a serious dent in your wallet (and in some cases your savings account).
Intel offers a Three Year warranty on their retail CPUs.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
What can I say that has not already been said? The QX9650 is an amazing CPU and simply outperforms anything that AMD has on the market right now in terms of general performance and multi-media creation and playback.
Where gaming is concerned you are not going to see much of an increase in terms of “frames-per-second” based performance, what you will see is an increase in the ability of your system (equipped with the QX9650) to handle all of the AI and other streaming data that is not GPU bound.
This will free up your system to handle the massive amounts of data being processed by the GPU.
Will this make your frame rate go up? No, but it will make the game feel more fluid and responsive. In games with heavy AI the enemies will seem to react and respond faster this is especially apparent on the higher difficulty levels.
Overclocking on the QX9650 was very easy, without much fuss at all I was able to get the QX9650 to run at 1GHz over stock speeds with no RAM tweaks and only a minor bump in voltage.
Intel also walks away with the Multi-Tasking crown despite the limitations of the non-shared Cache between the two sets of cores. The 12MB of cache tends to make up for this lack and the higher speed RAM available more than removes that perceived bottleneck.
Even a few months after its release, the QX9650 still stands out as the performance leader in an increasingly one company race.