
AMD arguably has the better reputation (lately, at least) for maintaining a given socket interface and carrying it over as far as possible to support its latest processors. But Clarkdale was a win for Intel in that it employed the LGA 1156 interface introduced alongside Lynnfield (even if existing P55-based motherboards couldn’t take advantage of Clarkdale’s on-package graphics core).
Gulftown is made even more compelling by virtue of the fact that it drops into the same LGA 1366-based platforms introduced next to Bloomfield. This means coming in under the same 130W TDP.
At idle, the Core i7-980X actually uses a bit more power than Core i7-975 Extreme (likely a result of the slightly higher idle voltage reported by CPU-Z). But under load, the 32nm Gulftown chip goes lighter on power consumption. We wouldn’t advocate the Core i7-980X as a power-saving play, but it is amazing to see how 32nm manufacturing allows such a complex hexa-core processor to pull less juice from the wall than last-generation’s 45nm quad-core.
That observation aside, AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 scales back to 800 MHz at idle, hitting a low 94W system idle. But it’s not the lowest consumer under load—that honor (at least in the context of these five CPUs) goes to the Core i5-750, which is rated for up to 95W itself, but also benefits from a more efficient two-chip platform consisting of processor and PCH. The other contenders all lean on a processor, northbridge, and southbridge.
- Introduction
- Welcome To Gulftown
- Platform And Overclocking
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Benchmark Results: Media And Transcoding Apps
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead 2
- Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
- Power Consumption
- Conclusion
I'm guessing you didn't read this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/toms-hardware-reviews-news-comments,9855.html
I'm guessing you didn't read this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/toms-hardware-reviews-news-comments,9855.html
Nope, Haven't bothered looking at that. The 980x doesn't really make any difference in gaming but I wasn't expecting anything earth shattering. Does look good against the 965 x4 for mutlimedia applications.
It is a good reminder how to act on toms you should read it when you get the chance.
Wholly agreed.
Obviously this Intel won't be forcing down any reasonable prices, but I am hoping that AMD's six core will bring down the price of either the i5-750 or the i7-930.
I guess one can always hope...
Great article!
This is exact same thing I've been dreaming of, a high clocked 32nm quad at a reasonable price, maybe even with an unlocked multiplier
Hopefully we don't have to wait until Q1 2011 to be able to buy one.
Great article though I really enjoyed flipping through all the pages of benchies... sort of wish you could have used dual 5970's for the gaming test though since the 5850 seems to have been your bottleneck with all the game tests.
Without seeing numbers, I'd guess AMD will counter with 2/3 of the performance, (possibly more depending on how aggressive they take thier speed boost), but it will be at 1/3 of the price. We may find out as early as April.