The Core 2 of the Matter

The continuing battle for CPU supremacy between AMD and Intel took a surprising turn over the past year with Intel’s one-two punch - that would be the Core and the Core 2, the company’s new processor lines. While the company’s Core Duo processors mostly found their way into notebook computers, there were a few products that used it on the desktop, notably Apple in its iMac and Mac Mini products. With the Core 2, there was more of a push to get these processors into desktop computers right off the bat, and for good reason: these new processors use less power than the previous Pentium 4 chips, but also outperform them in raw processing power. While that certainly allows computer manufacturers to cram higher-performing chips into smaller cases, it also provides a raw power benefit even to power users. With one processor line, Intel managed to find a solution for both the portables and the power users, leaving AMD temporarily in the dust. (Though with a few new technologies just around the corner, you can bet that AMD will leapfrog back into the lead before too much longer.) Even more interesting is Intel’s recent release of the first quad-core processor in the desktop space. The QX6700 processor essentially fused two 2.66 GHz Core 2 processors together in a single module instead of putting all four cores onto a single die, so some might accuse Intel of cheating a bit. Nonetheless, the release of such a product for desktop-oriented motherboards is a clear indication that the company intends to follow up on the multi-core strategy right across the board. Who knows: a year from now, we may even see eight or 16-core processors available for the desktop. In the lab with Core 2 Over the past number of months, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate a few of the processors in the new Core 2 line, including: • 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 (dual-core, 4MB L2 cache)• 2.93 GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 (dual-core, 4MB L2 cache)• 2.66 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (quad-core, 8MB L2 cache) During my initial evaluation, I benchmarked the two dual-core models against the older Pentium D-era 955 processor, which was a 3.46 GHz processor dual-core model. The hardware configuration remained identical throughout - the only change that I made was swapping the processor out. My initial expectation was that the 955 (technically known as the Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 955) would outperform the newer Core 2 models - after all, it not only had a fairly substantial clock speed advantage, but it also featured hyperthreading in addition to the dual cores, adding up to a virtual quad-core configuration. The actual speed tests tell a different story. The first thing that’s obvious the testing results is that both of the Core 2 processors outperformed the previously top-of-the-line 955 processor by a fairly substantial margin. It wasn’t even close in the vast majority of the benchmarking tests. In fact, the only test where the older 955 processor showed any advantage at all was in the Sandra Arith-metic floating-point test, and that was only against the lesser of the Core 2 models tested. What’s even more impressive is a look at the power consumption numbers for the three processors: not only did the computer use less energy with the Core 2 processors installed - remember, the only difference in the hardware configuration was the processor itself - but the Core 2 configurations used less energy with the processor running at full tilt than the 955 configuration did while idle. So in other words, the Core 2 blows the doors off the older models without even breaking a sweat. Going quad If the release of the new Core 2 processors was a surprise, the release of the quad-core version of the processor shortly afterward was even more so. The big question though: would the home user see any real advantage moving up to a quad-core machine? The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of users won’t see a tremendous speed advantage moving from a single-core processor to a dual-core processor, let alone going with a quad-core machine. Why? Most applications currently aren’t even capable of using more than one core at a time, so the biggest advantage most users will see is the ability to run different programs on different cores. Ultimately, it’s the power users who would really be able to take fullest advantage of such a configuration, so the question is naturally whether those same power users would get an even bigger advantage bumping up to the full four cores. For the quad-core testing, I again used the exact same hardware configuration for both the dual-core X6800 and the quad-core QX6700, swapping only the processors. (Note: Because a couple of months had elapsed since the initial tests, my main hardware configuration had changed slightly, and consequently I am not comparing the numbers from the quad-core tests directly against the 955 and the E6700 models. That’s also why the numbers for the X6800 differed slightly between the two tests, for those playing along on our home game.) The results here were somewhat less conclusive - while the quad-core processor overcame a slower clock speed to take the lead in all of the CPU-based tests in Sandra 2007 as well as a general overall advantage in PCMark, the dual-core machine achieved the best overall results in our standard application-based benchmark, SysMark 2004 SE. That happened for one simple reason: the real-world applications used by SysMark 2004 SE are pretty much all incapable of executing on more than one core at a time. This means most of them can’t take proper advantage of a dual-core setup, let alone a quad-core setup, which means it all comes down to clock speed at that point. True, most of these applications are a couple of years old by this point, but it’s worth noting that will be the case for most users out there: the majority of applications people will use from day-to-day are NOT optimized for multi-core configurations, and that includes the majority of the PC games out there, too...sorry, performance-hungry gaming fans! Surprisingly, despite the fact that Adobe PhotoShop CS2 is designed to take advantage of multiple cores, that’s only true for certain portions of the program. In our tests, the radial blur filter most definitely benefited from the additional two cores (cutting the render time in half), but automated processes like contact sheet creation showed no apparent benefit. Worse, the addition of those two additional cores nearly erased one of the big selling points of the Core 2 processors: lower power consumption. While the dual-core and quad-core processors both sported reasonable power consumption while idle, the quad-core became quite power-hungry when the performance needle was pegged, gobbling up 50 watts more than the dual-core CPU. While most of the current system benchmarks showed no huge benefit in the move from dual-core to quad-core, the Sandra tests did show the great potential of the move to quad, with a fairly substantial jump in raw processor power. What that means is that as soon as the majority of the software currently available becomes optimized for multi-core execution, quad-core will really start to pay dividends. Pricing it out There’s no sense beating about the bush: top-of-the-line processors tend to be expensive and that’s definitely the case here. In fact, at press time, the Pentium Extreme 955, the Core 2 X6800 and the quad-core Core 2 QX6700 were all hovering around $1,299 for the processor alone. For those who absolutely must have every ounce of power possible, that makes it a no-brainer to go with the quad-core processor, providing the motherboard is compatible (and you’re not trying to cram it into a tiny case). The good news is that you don’t have to go in to the tune of over a grand in order to get top-notch performance, if you’re willing to settle for a processor that’s a few notches from the top: the E6700 is almost half the price of the two Extreme Core 2 models, but the performance still outshines all of the previous Intel processors.