Clovertown Performance Preview: Rise of the Quad Core

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Clovertown will initially be released in four bins: 2.66 and 2.33GHz with a 1.33GT/s front side bus and two lower end models at 1.86 and 1.6GHz with a 1.06GT/s bus. The highest bin has a 120W TDP, while all other models are at 80W. The 2.33GHz device will be priced at parity with the existing 3GHz Woodcrest, while the 2.66GHz part will be marketed as a higher bin and priced accordingly.

For this review, we will be using a single ?Starlake? system, based on the Blackford chipset, with two different pairs of processors: Woodcrest 3GHz and Clovertown 2.33GHz. Note that while these two processors are priced at the same level, a higher performance Clovertown exists and will be used for most benchmarks, but does have higher power consumption. The system used is described below in Chart 1, additionally, hardware prefetch was enabled for all benchmarks. Both power and performance numbers will be collected and analyzed for four Windows x64 based benchmarks: POV-Ray, Sungard, XML Test 1.1 and SPECjbb2005. Performance is measured and averaged over three runs of each benchmark, and power is measured using an Extech power meter, which provides 'watts at the wall'.

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