Core 2 Duo (Conroe) launched about twelve days ago with a lot of fanfare. With the largest boost in real performance the industry has seen in almost a decade it is easy to understand the big splash Core 2 Duo has made in a very short time. AnandTech delivered an in-depth analysis of CPU performance in Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back. With so much new and exciting information about Conroe's performance, it is easy to assume that since Core 2 Duo uses DDR2, just like NetBurst, then memory performance must therefore be very similar to the DDR2-based Intel NetBurst architecture.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. While the chipsets still include 975X and the new P965 and the CPU is still Socket T, the shorter pipes, 4 MB unified cache, intelligent look-ahead, and more work per clock cycle all contribute to Conroe exhibiting very different DDR2 memory behavior. It would be easy to say that Core 2 Duo is more like the AMD AM2, launched May 23rd, which now supports DDR2 memory as well. That would be a stretch, however, since AM2 uses an efficient on-processor memory controller, and the launch review found Core 2 Duo faster at the same clock speed than the current AM2. This is another way of saying Conroe is capable of doing more work per cycle - something we had been saying for several years about Athlon64 compared to NetBurst,
The move by AMD from Socket 939 to Socket AM2 is pretty straightforward. The new AM2 processors will continue to be built using the same 90nm manufacturing process currently used for Athlon 64 processors until some time in early to mid-2007. AMD will then slowly roll-out their 65nm process from the bottom of the line to the top according to AMD road-maps. This could include memory controller enhancements and possibly more. Performance of AM2 only changed very slightly with the move to DDR2, generally in the range of 0% to 5%. The only substantive difference with AM2 is the move from DDR memory to official AMD DDR2 memory support.
Our AM2 launch reviews and the article First Look: AM2 DDR2 vs. 939 DDR Performance found that AM2 with DDR2-533 memory performed roughly the same as the older Socket 939 with fast DDR400 memory. Memory faster than DDR2-533, namely DDR2-667 and DDR2-800, brought slightly higher memory performance to AM2.
The Core 2 Duo introduction is quite different. Clock speed moved down and performance moved up. The top Core 2 Duo, the X6800, is almost 1GHz slower than the older top NetBurst chip and performs 35% to 45% faster. With the huge efficiency and performance increases comes different behavior with DDR2 memory.
With the world now united behind DDR2, it is time to take a closer look at how DDR2 behaves on both the new Intel Core 2 Duo and the AMD AM2 platforms. The performance of both new DDR2 platforms will also be compared to NetBurst DDR2 performance, since the DDR2 NetBurst Architecture has been around for a couple of years and is familiar. We specifically want to know the measured latency of each new platform, how they compare in memory bandwidth, and the scaling of both Core 2 Duo and AM2 as we increase memory speed to DDR2-1067 and beyond. With this information and tests of the same memory on each platform, we hope to be able to answer whether memory test results on Conroe, for instance, will tell us how the memory will perform on AM2.
In addition we have an apples-apples comparison of AM2 and Core 2 Duo running at 2.93GHz (11x266) using the same memory at the same timings and voltages with the same GPU, hard drive, and PSU. This allows a direct memory comparison at 2.93GHz at DDR2-1067. It also provides some very revealing performance results for Core 2 Duo and AM2 at the exact same speeds in the same configurations.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. While the chipsets still include 975X and the new P965 and the CPU is still Socket T, the shorter pipes, 4 MB unified cache, intelligent look-ahead, and more work per clock cycle all contribute to Conroe exhibiting very different DDR2 memory behavior. It would be easy to say that Core 2 Duo is more like the AMD AM2, launched May 23rd, which now supports DDR2 memory as well. That would be a stretch, however, since AM2 uses an efficient on-processor memory controller, and the launch review found Core 2 Duo faster at the same clock speed than the current AM2. This is another way of saying Conroe is capable of doing more work per cycle - something we had been saying for several years about Athlon64 compared to NetBurst,
The move by AMD from Socket 939 to Socket AM2 is pretty straightforward. The new AM2 processors will continue to be built using the same 90nm manufacturing process currently used for Athlon 64 processors until some time in early to mid-2007. AMD will then slowly roll-out their 65nm process from the bottom of the line to the top according to AMD road-maps. This could include memory controller enhancements and possibly more. Performance of AM2 only changed very slightly with the move to DDR2, generally in the range of 0% to 5%. The only substantive difference with AM2 is the move from DDR memory to official AMD DDR2 memory support.
Our AM2 launch reviews and the article First Look: AM2 DDR2 vs. 939 DDR Performance found that AM2 with DDR2-533 memory performed roughly the same as the older Socket 939 with fast DDR400 memory. Memory faster than DDR2-533, namely DDR2-667 and DDR2-800, brought slightly higher memory performance to AM2.
The Core 2 Duo introduction is quite different. Clock speed moved down and performance moved up. The top Core 2 Duo, the X6800, is almost 1GHz slower than the older top NetBurst chip and performs 35% to 45% faster. With the huge efficiency and performance increases comes different behavior with DDR2 memory.
With the world now united behind DDR2, it is time to take a closer look at how DDR2 behaves on both the new Intel Core 2 Duo and the AMD AM2 platforms. The performance of both new DDR2 platforms will also be compared to NetBurst DDR2 performance, since the DDR2 NetBurst Architecture has been around for a couple of years and is familiar. We specifically want to know the measured latency of each new platform, how they compare in memory bandwidth, and the scaling of both Core 2 Duo and AM2 as we increase memory speed to DDR2-1067 and beyond. With this information and tests of the same memory on each platform, we hope to be able to answer whether memory test results on Conroe, for instance, will tell us how the memory will perform on AM2.
In addition we have an apples-apples comparison of AM2 and Core 2 Duo running at 2.93GHz (11x266) using the same memory at the same timings and voltages with the same GPU, hard drive, and PSU. This allows a direct memory comparison at 2.93GHz at DDR2-1067. It also provides some very revealing performance results for Core 2 Duo and AM2 at the exact same speeds in the same configurations.
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Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
We purchased Everest and believed we were using the latest release version. The version we used for testing does support Core 2 Duo, but not with all the features supported in 3.01. We will update to version 3.01, rerun Everest tests, and post the new results in the review. This was an honest oversight, not a conspiracy.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
Version 3.01 was just released July 16, 2006.saratoga - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
Your instincts are right, those latency numbers are impossible. The prefeter is outsmarting your benchmark, and you're not measuring memory latency because a lot of the fetches are coming out of the L2. The reason latency numbers look so low is because L2 is quite a bit faster then memory ;)
I'm not sure that Intel actually developed prefetching. Its been used by the entire industry (Sun, Intel, AMD, IBM) for many, many years. What you have here is just a poor benchmark, not a breakthrough.
Which is the problem here. The page says "memory latency" which is flat out wrong. You simply are not getting 36 ns access time out of the combined FSB, memory controller and DRAM cells. It is not possible, and its a pretty big oversite IMO to claim otherwise.
If you want to test prefetcher, then go for it. Just don't call it memory latency, because the two are not the same thing.
sld - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
So now ScienceMark is a turncoat too, after showing AMD superiority for the past year or so?Get a grip, people, as Everest has shown, memory latency on the Core 2 Duo is still higher than that on the K8.
What ScienceMark shows is that the prefetchers on the Core 2 Duo are brilliant, the results bear out and the Core 2 Duo beats the K8 in most (if not all) games convincingly (if I use superlatives, even if they are true, I'll contract rabies, you know) and does that clock-for-clock (not to mention $-for-$ until AMD generates a significant price crash).
All the while, I've been tolerating Intel fanboys crapping about non-existent benefits about their Netbust crap, and now you want me to tolerate the beginnings of AMD fanboyism too?
mino - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
These numbers clearly show that siencemark developer does not tak into account 4M caches.It quite simple, at a the time of its creation 512k was considered a big cache.
As for SuprePI 1M - the same, 1M was chosen as standard no because it is a nice number, instead it was chosen because at the time there was no need for bigger datasets. Datasets for 1M _were_ simply big enough to show also memory perf., not just the size of the cache.
redpriest_ - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
Actually, ScienceMark tests up to 16 MB of memory. See, I forsaw a day where this would be a problem and sized the test appropriately. What you're seeing is that the prefetcher is clever enough to pick up all the patterns we use to "fool" hardware prefetchers. This in itself is a great indicator of performance.Of course, our next revision will have a harder algorithm to fool, but I think we'll also keep the old one (because it still shows an important data point).
1 of 3 authors of SM2.0
mino - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
Boys give us EDIT ..duploxxx - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
Last months have given drastic changes in the cpu world for performance king and price.but the conclusion quality and review headers of anand are going further down day by day. (as a review site you should bring info to the world not fanboyism and sponser)come on such a statement to begin "Core 2 Duo (Conroe) launched about twelve days ago with a lot of fanfare. With the largest boost in real performance the industry has seen in almost a decade it is easy to understand the big splash Core 2 Duo has made in a very short time" do you really believe what you are saying or are you paid for each overmarketing comment you publish.
the article concept is nice looking at memory latency, but what cas level do you use at a rated speed, we al know that conroe is a better performer with any memory used but things change when the real cas latency is used, so a whole article without additional cas info is just a half article off no use. When things get realy interesting in page 7, you just stop performance comparisson on ddr2 1067 and 1112. i know its difficult because for now there is no devider to bring this memory to equal speed but you can clearly see that k8 is much more memory dependent that the conroe. conroe is saturated. in half life and quake bringing the memory to 1200 would give an equal performance.
looking at page 8 you convert the chart of page 7 to a nicer way to look :)
but for sure you changed the cas on the oc'ed fx down because looking at the linear performance gain from ddr-2 400 till ddr2-800, there is only gain due to the oc'ed fx and not due to the added memory bandwith. the gain is not linear to the performance gain on page 7.
I will hold my comments on for example the superpi... we all know wat its worth.
A review on 64bit or multithread performance would be nice to see how well the design is made for the future or are you as a review site restricted to some type of benchmarks?
same i asked on the server woodcrest. you bring benchmarks that are unable to compare. here you bring reviews where in the first line of the review you already have a conclusion and the benchmark contains not enough info to reflect in real life what to buy for memory and cas latency for example to get the desired performance.
OcHungry - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
I concur with you. It is interesting that memory timings used was not mentioned in the review.Using 266x11 helps but it is not enough for AMD’s powerful IMC . If 330x9 was used instead it would have given AMD a considerable boost in performance. Anandtech is trying to show Core 2 duo is a better cpu, but fails to notice any improvement through utilization of IMC, memory latency and mem speed. What's funnier, is that the data provided, clearly shows a substantial increase in performance if memory speed is changed to 266mhz, 1:1 ratio. The increase in performance is at least by 5% across the benchmarks. My calculations show: for every 10% increase in memory speed, performance increases by 2%. Hence, running FX62 @ 330x9 amounts to 11% increase in performance. We know AMD is releasing an Improved IMC capable of utilizing memory speed in1T. 1T will increase performance by another 3-5%. The memory latency is another crucial factor for AMD. According to the author of this review: “ memory speed does not affect Conroe’s performance”. Great. But since latency tremendously affects AMD’s platforms it should have been considered to give us meaningful comparison. Most probably The timings used were: 4-4-4-12 (corsair DDR2 800). Tightening the timings to 3-3-3-8 would have given another 7% to 10% boost in FX62's performance.
If we add all the mentioned optimal settings for FX62: (11%+3%+7%) = 21% increase in performance should have resulted- which is fair, accurate, and represent the true comparison of FX62 against E6800.
Further more, 64bit OS and window vista is reported to give AMD about 16% improvement compared to 10% for conroe. This will give another 6% boost in performance for AMD’s platform that brings the total increase in performance to 27% washing clean all the superficial benchmarks(that were tilted ).
As far as gaming is concern, we know vid card is the deciding facto. So I believe AMD has position itself perfectly for every corner of the market.
To say Intel has captured the mid and high end of the market, is as erroneous as when Intel was pushing Netburst to capture gaming enthusiasts. We know that marchitecture and All that PR failed then, and will fail agin now.
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - link
My calculation says you are wrong. As much as my calculation is wrong, your logic/calculation is even moreso.
Have you looked at the performance gain that Athlon 64's gain with lower latencies?? Granted it was a single core Athlon 64, but people were still spreading bullshit that Athlon 64 will gain a lot from lower latencies. Yes it was in Anandtech forums!!
Tech-Report: http://techreport.com/etc/2005q4/mem-latency/index...">http://techreport.com/etc/2005q4/mem-latency/index...
Looking at Core 2 Duo, you can get BETTER performance with LOWER COST memory modules than A64. That means price/performance ratio goes FURTHER in Core 2's favor.
Not very many people think super ultra low latency is important, they are not stupid enough to spend extra $200 on memory that gives MAYBE 5% performance increase.
XS also telling you not to be stupid: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...