Intel Core 2 Extreme - Benchmarking Conroe

Intel's new Core 2 CPUs are probably the most anticipated processors yet to ship since AMD's first Athlon 64. In many ways, Intel's new desktop CPUs, set to launch in July, are the most important CPU products for the company since the original P6 processor in 1995. Intel has been promising lower power utilization and greater performance.We've described the Core 2 architecture back in March. The Core 2 microarchitecture gives us some clues as to why performance might be better. Conroe is a four-wide architecture, so can issue four instructions per clock, as opposed to the three-wide used in NetBurst and Athlon 64 architectures. The Core 2 will also contain a full 128-bit wide SSE (Streaming SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) Extensions) engine that can execute one SIMD instruction per clock. The Extreme and higher-end mainstream desktop CPUs will offer 4MB of shared L2 cache. Finally, the use of micro-ops and macro-ops fusion, which can combine certain types of instructions as they come into the pipeline, enhances performance.

Intel also had two systems set up, both with Core 2 Extreme CPUs. Please note that these were systems configured and built by Intel. We did have full freedom to look at the BIOS settings, as well as run the tests we performed on our own, with no guidance from the Intel staff present. Here's how the systems were configured:

CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme @ 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme @ 3.2GHzMemory 2GB DDR2/667 @ CAS 4-4-4-12 2GB DDR2/"733" @ CAS 5-5-5-15Storage 2 x Hitachi SATA, RAID 0 2 x Seagate SATA, RAID 0Cooling Stock Intel air cooler Intel Sealed Liquid CoolingGraphics ATI CrossFire (2 x X1900) ATI CrossFire (2 x X1900)