Intel's Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 and Core2 E6750 part 2

Rendering Performance

POV Ray is one of the oldest raytracing programs out there and it has been updated I don't know how many times since we started using it first in 1997. One of the issues we observed repeatedly was that the SSE2 render engine was slower than the standard version. WIth the 3.7 beta .21, this has changed, the standard version turned out to be markedly slower than the "formerly slower" SSE2 version. Due to the expiration of the older version, we show data obtained with the latest beta with the caveat that they may not be exactly comparable with the older results.

Media Encoding

Video and audio encoding are becoming increasingly important in the world of personal computing. Home-editing of videos and sound recordings are among the popular applications as is just the standard archiving of DVD material. In the case of audio encoding, there is relatively little out there in terms of applications that are multithreaded, meaning that they would take advantage of multiple cores. Or if there are appications like that, they are not free and the generally short conversion times achieved with free download utilities do not provide enough anguish to actually purchase potentially faster, multithreaded applications.For this article we used three applications that at least ran in the 80-85% CPU utilization when encoding audiovisual material, namely DVD-Shrink 3.2. Dr.DivX 2.0 OSS and the latest version of Mainconcept, namely H.264 Encoder.

In the case of DVD-Shrink we compressed John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" from 4,464 MB to 3,323MB, a compression to 59.6%. Dr.DivX encoded a 4.2 MB file (Watermellon.mpg) to a DivX file at Extreme Quality (thread priority: low) and Mainconcept encoded the same Watermellon.mpg file to an [H.264] High, 1920 x 1080 pixel, 29.97 fps, 48,000Hz 16 bit MPG file.

3dMark 06

Conclusion

Intel once again came, saw and won and did so consistently by a landslide. The combination of DDR3, a new memory controller and the faster host bus interface turned out to be quite the "trio infernale", leaving the competition nothing but tears in their eyes. Rumor has it that the next generation Penryn CPUs will up the ante again over what we are seeing now, and the upcoming X38 platform will equally hit another homerun.

At this point, we cannot comment on products that have not been released yet. Fact is, though, that AMD will need a pretty gigantic leap to overturn the current market situation. On the other hand, it is not always top performance that counts, conservative power management and ultra-low pricing are the dominating factors in the bread and butter market.

All of that said and done, there is one last thing to do and that is to award Intel one of our coveted "Editor's Choice Awards". Well done!

Intel's Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 and Core2 E6750 part 1

Intel is releasing its latest steps in evolution of the CPU, that is, the Conroe and Kentsfield cores souped up to run on a 1333 MHz bus interface. Combined with the latest P35 chipset and some fast DDR3, do the new kids on the block have what it takes to up the ante again?

Evolution of a Winner

There is hardly a shadow of doubt about who owns the desktop performance segment. Intel’s Core2 design has re-created the Caesarian motto Veni Vidi Vici by sweeping essentially every single benchmark that is out there, from gaming applications to rendering performance and encoding, whatever could be won was – indeed – won. Part of the Imperial Laurels have to be attributed to the quad-core offerings, like the Core2 Quad Extreme 6700 and 6800. Despite sharing the same host bus these quad core processors have managed to stay abreast of the competition, courtesy of highly sophisticated memory management that, regardless of the rather pedestrian values in synthetic benchmarks, appears to provide the correct data in sufficiently timely fashion. Needless to say, though that this is still one of the bottlenecks in the overall system architecture and this is where the new processors identified by a -50 as their last two product numbers promise some major improvement.

To make a long story short, Intel is doing three things simultaneously, each of which synergistically contributes to an overall increase in performance. The first thing is the introduction of a new, lower latency memory controller as part of the P35 chipset. The second factor is the introduction of DDR3 that finally overcomes some of the childhood maladies of DDR2. The third factor is what offsets the new line of CPU from its predecessors, they are running at a whopping 1333 MHz host bus interface. To be true, it is a 333 MHz clock and the bus is quad-pumped for 1333 MHz data rate over a 64-bit interface that in the final analysis is capable of transferring 10.67 GB sec from the system logic a.k.a. North Bridge to the CPU and vice versa.

The P35 Stop Gap

Before delving into performance issues, we would like to mention a few other things. The P35 chipset as it is almost common knowledge is only an intermediate chipset on the way to the next best thing coming from Intel, that is the X38 chipset. A lesser known fact is that aside from Intel, nVidia is also grinding the battleaxes by releasing BIOS updates for their nForce 680i chipset enabling 1333 MHz support along with future support for the Penryn core – for the time being with DDR2 support only but there is also a DDR3 version on the horizon.

CPU Details

Under the Hood of the Core2 Duo 6750 and the Core2 Extreme 6850 is nothing new, we have the same Conroe and Kentsfield processors that we already saw in earlier productions and that were largely responsible for re-establishing Intel's leading role in the performance desktop segment.

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