Quick and Dirty Penryn Benchmarks

An anonymous reader writes "So Intel has their quad-core Penryn processors all set and ready to launch in November. There are benchmarks for the dual-core Wolfdale all over the place, but this seems to be the first article to put the quad-core Yorkfield to the test. It looks like the Yorkfield is only about 7-8% faster than the Kentsfield with similar clock speeds and front-side bus."

Can you SSE Me Now?

[Clear Monkey]

"Intel expects SSE4 optimizations to deliver performance improvements in video authoring, imaging, graphics, video search, off-chip accelerators, gaming and physics applications. Early benchmarks with an SSE4 optimized version of DivX 6.6 Alpha yielded a 116 percent performance improvement due to SSE4 optimizations." Not bad...

AMD Is Dead If They Don't Change The Game

[osewa77]

AMD rose to this position primarily because they didn't make Intel's mistakes - trying to force a new CPU architecture on the market (Itanium) instead of incrementally developing the X86 line, and focusing on clock-speed (P4) at the expense of performance per watt. Now that Intel is focused on performance per watt, AMD needs to find a new differentiator for their chips.

Perhaps they should start thinking about how to integrate a high quality Vista-capable GPU into their processors? (afterall they acquired ATI). How about sound cards, USB ports, et cetera. If they can fit 90% of a typical motherboard into the processor and usher in a new era of affordable and efficient computers while intel is busy playing with 64-core chips, why not?

Re:Any AMD Barcelona Benchmarks?

[CajunArson]

Barcelona is faster than Intel's current line-up and does not want to see Intel up the pace more by releasing such numbers.

    That may have been true 6 months ago, but the K10 is supposed to be officially announced in about 16 days on September 10 (since AMD claims not to do paper launches it is supposed to be widely available then too... ymmv). AMD is not going to be able to stop benchmarks after it is released, and while Intel can adapt quickly, it can't turn on a dime in 2 weeks time. AMD has not been doing well in the PR and benchmarking battles since Core 2 came out, if K10 really was that amazing you would be seeing all the usual suspects putting out full reviews right now in order to generate hype. I'm leaning towards your second theory, and most analysts are too.