Softpedia >News >Technology & Gadgets >CPU
Softpedia Homepage   

INTEL Rolls Out the First 8-core 45nm Penryn Benchmarks

The fastest V8 ever is Penryn-powered

Jun 8, 2007 07:16 GMT  ·  By
INTEL's 45nm Penryn Wafer
   INTEL's 45nm Penryn Wafer

Lately INTEL has been trying to get everyone's attention with its new CPUs. Well, maybe lately is a little off since INTEL has tried that throughout the latest years. But now, more than ever, INTEL has a perfectly good reason to do that since AMD's Barcelona is almost an equal competitor. Almost...

Almost a day ago, INTEL housed a private meeting inside Computex where it showed off a new V8 system capable of housing two 45nm Penryn processors. Both the CPUs ran at 3.00GHz and offered a combined total cache size of 24MB (12MB for each CPU). Being a V8 system also translated into full FB-DIMM support so INTEL filled the memory banks with no less than 16,358MB of FB-DIMMs.

Evidently the only "commercial operating system" that could be suited to run on the V8 was Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition. And everyone was ready to party. CineBench (release 10) was used in order to measure the pure performance of the multi-CPU array. The results were equally impressive with the 3GHz Penryn producing score of 22,936 points at default speed.

By comparison, a single quad core QX6800 running at 2.93GHz pulls out about 11,000. And if you multiply that with 2 you will notice that there aren't any significant differences between 2 QX6800 CPUs and a V8 based on the 3GHz Penryn.

On the other hand AMD is getting about 16,000 with a pair of Barcelona CPUs on the same Cinebench 10. Now I don't really know what Barcelona's core speed was but I doubt it surpassed the 1.6-1.8GHz mark. Unfortunately AMD won't be able to up Barcelona to the same clockspeed that the Penryns use. And that can't be good for business.

All in all, one thing is clear. AMD's Barcelona is about as fast as a Core 2 Duo in clock/clock wars. Unfortunately it's not faster. And as it turns out INTEL can put about 1GHz of distance between its cores and AMD's ones. In conclusion, if AMD is unable to roll out a 3GHz Barcelona, the K10 project will have the same fate as the K8.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .