In launching Kentsfield, Intel beats rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc to the quad-core punch. But AMD’s forthcoming quad-core CPU, due mid-2007 or so, may end packing more performance.
Intel’s Kentsfield, called Core 2 Extreme quad-core QX6700, is up to 80% faster than its Core 2 Extreme X6800, or Conroe, counterpart, claimed Intel. The latter is, of course, the chipmaker’s high-end dual-core desktop offering that launched in July.
Core 2 chips are build on Intel’s relatively new Core microarchitecture that was designed to be both low-powered and high-performance, rather than just performance alone.
But Kentsfield isn’t a power-saving chip by any means. Indeed, it offers little realized benefit to the average corporate computer user over Conroe.
Instead, Kentsfield, a 2.66GHz chip with a 1066MHz front-side bus, is more for computational-heavy usage, including digital content creation, engineering analysis, such as CAD, and actuarial and other financial applications.
Steve Smith, director of operations for Intel digital enterprise group, claimed rendering is 58% faster for users building digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio.
In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only. For the average office worker who uses their PC for general productivity apps, such as communications and garden-variety computing, Smith recommended the Core 2 Duo from a price point and performance perspective.
And because the quad-core is relatively power hungry it also isn’t the choice for mobile workers. Smith said it would be some time before quad-core shows up in a notebook.
According to Anand Lal Shimpi, chief executive of hardware analysis outfit AnandTech, Kentsfield is nothing more than two Conroes placed on a single package. Much like Presler before it, Kentsfield is technically a quad-core processor with two separate die on the same package.
Kentsfield’s two individual die are treated as one, which means that when only one of the die is being utilized, the second one cannot power down and runs at the same frequency and voltage as the other active die. Also, the two cores within each die must run at the same pace and voltage also.
When Kentsfield runs all four of its CPU threads simultaneously, it doesn’t use that much more power than Core yet is doing more work. However, when only running two threats, Kentsfield is quite wasteful with its power consumption, Shimpi said.
A more efficient solution would be to allow each core to operate at its own frequency, and an even better implementation would require independent power planes per core — allowing for different voltages depending on load, Shimpi said.
This is, however, more difficult to implement than Intel’s current architecture, Shimpi added. While AMD may launch later than Intel, it promises to address at least part of this problem. AMD has said it quad-core chips would include four processor cores as well as four memory controllers on one die.
AMD has already announced that its Barcelona quad-core CPUs will support independent clock speeds per core, but not independent voltages, Shimpi noted.
Intel’s Smith said it would be at least two years before quad-cores hit mainstream computing on the desktop and several years before it shows up in notebooks.
Intel will launch a mainstream version of Kentsfield in the first quarter of next year. It will be called Core 2 Quad Q6600 and will run at 2.4GHz, priced at $851 or slightly below the Kentsfield’s $999 price tag, which is the same as Conroe’s.
The budget quad-core version also will have a slightly smaller thermal envelope, at 105 watts, compared to 130 watts with Kentsfield.
For sure, more cores for the desktop are on the way, even though they will likely show up in servers first, Smith said.
Intel has also previously claimed that during the second half of this decade users could expect about a 3x increase in performance at any price point.
