Wolfdale is 9.8% faster than Conroe at the same clock speed

The good folks at www.hkepc.com have benchmarked a Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.33GHz/ 4MB L2/1333MHz FSB) versus a Intel "Wolfdale" ES Sample (2.33GHz/6MB L2/1333MHz FSB)

SSE4 + Core MA Refresh

A simple Arithmatic average of the 46 different benchmarks shows that with the same Bus/Clock speeds the Wolkdale is 9.8% faster.

Wolfdale will also top out at 3.33 ghz versus 3.00 ghz (11.1% clock speed advantage) so doing some very rough and dirty math the fastest Wolfdale will be +/- 20% (11.1% clock + 9.8% IPC) - Not a quantum leap, but also better than a boot to the head.

Some things (basically the ones that use SSE "N+1" ) show a big advantage (Gaming, Video Conversion) in other things the advantage is a lot less (Typically 5-7%)

In some things there is virtually no advantage, but in no case did the Wolfdale actually run slowers.

cool my 6750 systems should rock! by by e6600

wow - another thorn in the amd foot!

another spear in the wounded but not nearly dead amd - wait it's "its not a true quad core"!

i can't believe how amazing conroe is, i know i'm an amd fanboi, but i am impressed by conroe, its cool that intel can shrink it so well. i'm sure i'll have a g33 wolfdale setup when the price is right....I still think Intel isn't prepared for DDR3 (but i'm not saying amd is.)

Do you have a DivX encoder that can actually use 4 cores? If yes, what is it called please?

I'm waiting until Penryn or Barcelona push the E2XXX or E4XXX series to below 10$ And the Netburst to below 2$ mark and Celeron to Free (Wishful thinking)

It's not the program that will utilize multi-core, it is the DivX codec itself. From what I've read DivX 6.0+ supports up to 4 cores, DivX 6.6+ supports SSE4.

I can't recall where I saw the benchmarks, but a Quad Core Penryn isn't that much faster than a Dual Core Penryn. From the benchmarks I save a QX6800 was able to encode a 5 minute file in 38 seconds. The Dual Core did it in 22 seconds. The Quad Core did it in 18 seconds.

If I can find it I will post the link. It was one of the first pre-production benchmarks released.

One last comment, to the best of my knowledge, DivX 6.6+ encoding is still not fully compatible with Vista. You may be able to watch DivX movie (maybe), but you certainly will not be able to encode.

I'm not gonna bother upgrading to Vista until at least SP1 and DivX releases a compatible codec.