Intel Core Duo (Yonah) Performance Preview - Part II

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Despite the shortcomings of the initial article, we did manage to get a good look at the performance we could expect from Yonah. Mainly, that it was a fairly strong successor to the single core Pentium M and even more impressive was that it offered performance equal to that of AMD?s Athlon 64 X2 without an on-die memory controller.

Many AnandTech readers kept our methods in check however by quickly pointing out that the Yonah vs. Athlon 64 X2 comparison wasn?t exactly fair, as Yonah is equipped with a full 2MB of L2 cache, whereas the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ we were comparing it against only had 512KB per processor, possibly painting Yonah in a better light.

So for this follow-up we?ve done two important things; for starters, we?ve updated the benchmark suite considerably, including modern day games and a few professional-level applications to hopefully get a better perspective on Yonah?s performance. We?ve also included an Athlon 64 X2 running at 2.0GHz, but with each core having a full 1MB L2 cache, making the Yonah vs. X2 comparison as close to even as possible (not mentioning the fact that AMD has twice the advantage in this round, with both a larger L1 cache and an on-die memory controller, but it should make things interesting).

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