2.33GHz Penryn, Conroe Comparo

Although Penryn is not slated to be released for a few more months, Anand has found himself with a Wolfdale Dual-Core 2.33GHz chip. Naturally, he compared it directly with a Conroe Dual-Core of the same frequency. Some of the results are actually quite impressive, even though this should be considered an early-look. DiVX for example had nice 10% gains, which is impressive for the fact that it’s not even optimized for the SSE4 instruction set. So when that happens, results should be even more impressive.

In addition to standard performance increase, the power consumption has noticeably improved as well. Overclocking also was as good as expected, with Anand hitting 3.22GHz without increasing the voltages at all. Although Penryn is not mind-blowing at the current time, once SSE4-optimized applications start leaking their way into games and other apps, it might very well be.

Now that we have a general idea of clock-for-clock performance differences between Conroe and Wolfdale, we’re not nearly as worried about recommending that you build systems today as we once were. There’s no doubt that Wolfdale is faster clock-for-clock, but keep in mind that you won’t see Wolfdale until Q1 of next year and the performance advantage simply isn’t great enough to justify delaying a purchase by 6+ months if you need a system now.

Source: AnandTech