Mobile CPU Wars: Core 2 Duo vs. Core Duo
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 3, 2006 9:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Application Performance using Winstone 2004
Winstone 2004 consists of two different benchmark suites; the Business Winstone test focuses on office applications, while the Multimedia Content Creation benchmark contains many audio/visual applications that are more CPU limited.
The Core 2 Duo performance advantage shrinks even further in Business Winstone 2004. Here we're looking at less than a 2% improvement clock-for-clock.
The situation is a little better for Core 2 Duo under MMCC Winstone 2004, but we're still only talking about a 3.4% increase in performance. The explanation for the relatively lackluster performance improvement is two-fold:
1) Core Duo is already a very good performer, and
2) Core 2 Duo is crippled by a 667MHz FSB
To a lesser extent, we're also more I/O bound on a notebook since 2.5" hard drives are significantly slower than their 3.5" desktop counterparts. The more I/O bound we are, the less we're going to be able to see differences between CPUs. That being said, notebook users aren't going to have 3.5" drives in their systems, so like it or not, this is where the performance stands.
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juanpoh - Friday, August 4, 2006 - link
Looking at http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentiumm/i...">Intel Pentium M link, only 915 and 855 chipset is supported. However 945 chipset is listed as supported in http://www.intel.com/products/processor/celeron_m/...">Intel Celeron M link.jaybuffet - Friday, August 4, 2006 - link
I have the nx9420 notebook with the 945pm chipset... i was on hp support yesterday, and they said they would not support upgrading the CPU.. does that mean i am SOL because they wont upgrade the BIOS to support it?Pjotr - Friday, August 4, 2006 - link
Please correct the percentage numbers on http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?..."17.5% increase in performance" -> "17.5 % less time used" OR "21.3 % increaase in performance"
Same mistake for all other time based benchmarks.
shecknoscopy - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
Given the nearly identical architectures of the desktop Conroes and the new Merom chips - how well do all of you think the two would stack up in a direct side-by-side comparison? This is open to blatant conjecture, of course, as the necessary hardware to <b>really</b> make a single-variable experiment isn't out there. But for those of us considering mobile-on-desktop options, how much of a performance cut would we see jumping from a Conroe to a Merom?IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 5, 2006 - link
Intel mentioned something about having different prefetchers that match the market, meaning Woodcrest's Prefetchers are fit for workstation/server, Conroe for desktop, Merom for mobile applications(performance/battery life).
If you look at Core Extreme X6800 vs. Core 2 Duo E6700 benchmarks, you can see that in some reviews the differences are greater than the 267MHz clock difference(10% clock difference). Maybe Core Extreme has superior prefetchers to the Core 2 Duos, giving advantage in select few applications.
Sunrise089 - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
This was the exact question I just signed on to ask....so I await and answer as well.shecknoscopy - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
Woohoo! Great minds think alike, eh? Also, so do ours!JackPack - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
Which stepping did you use in this test? B1?EagleEye - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
I think the asus barebones configuration is mislabeled in this article. The s96j has the WXGA 1280x 800 screen while the z96j has the WSXGA 1680x 1050 screen. They either had an s96j or the native resolution is wrong as they stated it.Kalessian - Thursday, August 3, 2006 - link
I noticed that, too.