X-bit labs

Intel’s New 45nm Chips Up to Two Times Faster than Current, Claims Report.

Category: CPU

by Anton Shilov

[ 08/08/2007 | 01:42 PM ]

Even though the transition to improved Intel Core 2 micro-architecture with the new chips due to be available late this year is not typically considered as substantial for Intel Corp., a web-site, which managed to test an engineering sample of the chip reported up to 115% performance gains for the new products from the world’s largest chipmaker compared to current offerings.

According to a report from HKEPC web-site, Intel Core 2 Duo “Wolfdale” (2.33GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz processor system bus) performs from 0.22% to 115% faster compared to Intel Core 2 Duo “Conroe” processor (2.33GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 1333MHz PSB). Typically, the new chip delivers 5% to 15% of additional performance, but there are tests, like video encoding or advanced gaming, where the new micro-architecture skyrockets its performance.

Performance enhancements that Intel made with its “Penryn” family of chips made using 45nm process technology will increase the pressure on Advanced Micro Devices late this year and early next year, as the world’s No. 2 maker of x86 central processing units (CPUs) struggles to deliver its new K10-based micro-architecture AMD Phenom and AMD Opteron processors to the market.

Thanks to thinner fabrication technology, the new processor also consumes just about 59W, according to the test report, whereas its 65nm-based brother consumes approximately 83W when loaded to the maximum.

Intel announced in March that the new “Penryn” chips produced using 45nm process technology will have greater instructions per clock (IPC) execution, which means that they will be faster and more efficient even at the same clock-speeds with the current generation chips. Besides, the new chips will be able to run at higher clock-speeds compared to today’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad products.

The major micro-architectural improvements for new Intel Core 2 processors, besides SSE4 instruction set, include the so-called Unique Super Shuffle Engine and Radix 16 technique. The Super Shuffle Engine is a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing. Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications’ performance on multi-core chips.

Each of Intel’s dual-core Penryn chips will have 410 million transistors, up significantly from 291 million of current dual-core Conroe processors, however, thanks to 45nm process technology, the chips will have die size of 107 square millimeters, down about 25% from 155 square millimeters of the Conroe.