Loading ...Review: Intel’s New Quad-Core CPUs
In our lab tests, Intel’s 45nm Penryn CPU didn’t blow away the previous generation, but the tech behind it should keep Intel ahead.
There’s a new high-end desktop chip in town–namely, Intel’s Penryn family of CPUs, which are the first built on a 45nm manufacturing process developed by the chip giant. Our first WorldBench 6 tests with the new chip showed only a minor performance gain for the 45nm, 3-GHz QX9650 Core 2 Extreme versus the 65nm, 3-Ghz QX6850 Core 2 Extreme chip that it is supplanting. (See our chart “Penryn Speed: Minor Gains in Mainstream Apps,” or check out our review of the first Penryn-based system we’ve tested, a CyberPower Power Infinity Pro.) However, none of the applications in our test suite utilize the QX9650’s new SSE4 instructions, which can greatly speed up tasks such as some key operations in video encoding in apps that use SSE4. (Intel’s in-house benchmarks, and the demonstrations we saw at this fall’s Intel Developer Forum, back up that claim.)
Full Story Via PC World
Filed under: Desktops
