Today at its bi-annual developer conference (IDF), Intel officially unveiled the details of its next-generation mobile, desktop, and server processors shipping in the second-half of 2006. These are the processors we will see in PowerMacs and revised MacbookPros later this year, with announcements probable for WWDC in August.
The processors included the next-generation version of the Core Duo known as "Merom" -- a processor with identical battery life to the Duo, but with 20% greater performance and support for 64-bit execution. Merom is slated to ship late summer or early fall.
Intel also unveiled two next-generation processors for the desktop to replace the Pentium 4. The first was "Conroe", which will use 40% less power than Intel's current top-of-the-line P4, but offer 40% greater performance. Intel claims "Conroe" will be 20% faster than any chip available from the competition (AMD) in 2006. Conroe is slated to ship early this summer, just in time for the WWDC in August.
The second chip unveiled for the desktop was "Kentsfield", which integrates two Conroes onto a single chip (4-core processor) using less power than some of today's P4 chips. The quad-core "Kentsfield" processor is slated for release in January, 2007. A server version of the chip, dubbed "Clovertown," was also shown in a dual processor configuration (8 cores!) running Guild Wars at ridiculous speeds.
Just how fast will these processors be? The current Intel Core Duo @ 2.167MHz --
the fastest chip available in the new iMac and MacBook Pro -- comes in at 1748 SPECint_base2000 and 1580 SPECfp_base2000. By comparison, the 2.8GHz version of the Conroe is said to come in at 2800 SPECint_base2000 and 2500 SPECfp_base2000 -- a 60+% performance improvement. And this is only the "mid-range" version of the chip.
Vaporware? Not quite. Anandtech ran benchmarks on the new dual-core "Conroe," which you can see
here. In Anandtech's tests, the Conroe outperformed the higher-clocked, dual-core Athlon64 by up to 40%, and did it while using substantially less power, according to Intel. Note those benchmarks are only for the mid-range 2.66GHz version. According to Intel, the processor will be available in 2.93Ghz and 3.33GHz versions at release.
Anand's first articles on the conference (still in progress) are here:
General info:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2711
Benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2712
Top
