Benchmarks: Intel's first 45nm Penryn chip

Test setup & power consumption

The 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 has a 1,333MHz frontside bus (FSB) and is supported by Socket 775 motherboards based on Intel's X38 chipset. The new chip will also work with most other Socket 775 motherboards that support a 1,333MHz FSB, although this will depend on the manufacturer: a BIOS update will certainly be necessary for older boards.

Test setup
To evaluate the performance of the new 45nm quad-core QX9650 with 12MB of L2 cache, we compared it to Intel's previous desktop performance leader, the 65nm quad-core QX6850 with 8MB of L2 cache. Both chips have the same 3GHz clock speed and connect to the rest of the system over a 1,333MHz FSB. The benchmark results should therefore provide a direct comparison between the old and the new microarchitecture.

Intel leaves the clock frequency multiplier unlocked on its high-end Extreme processors, making overclocking straightforward. We therefore tested the new quad-core CPU at 3.33GHz. For comparison, we also added a 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1MB of L2 cache to the benchmark test. This three-year-old 90nm Prescott processor has only a single CPU core, but does offer parallel command processing courtesy of Hyperthreading technology.

The new Intel platform also supports DDR3 memory, so our tests will examine how this compares to the previous DDR2 memory technology.

Power consumption
One of the advantages of an improved manufacturing process is lower power consumption. The system with the new 45nm processor consumes significantly less power than the one with its 65nm predecessor in no-load operation: 190W compared to 227W. When the CPU is fully loaded, the trend is even stronger: the system with the 65nm QX6850 uses 337W, while the QX9650 system uses only 264W. Particularly striking is the comparison with the single-core 3GHz Pentium 4 machine, which uses 210W in quiescent mode and 277W under full load — more than the new quad-core chip.

 System specifications for power consumption tests