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Intel's Penryn Chip Performance Boosts

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Apr 12, 2001
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Intel announced some performance details on the upcoming Penryn processors at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing.

Penryn is the next chip family based on the Core micro-architecture and will include a number of enhancements along with a die-shrink to 45nm. The upcoming Penryn chips will be marketed under both the "Core" and "Xeon" brand names and encompass the entire spectrum of products (mobile, desktop, server).

According to Intel executive, Penryn-based computers will see the following speed improvements over the current Core 2 Extreme processors

- 15% for imaging-related
- 25% for 3-D rendering
- 40% for gaming
- 40% for video encoding (SSE4 optimized)

The comparison was made between 3.33GHz pre-production Penryn processor vs 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme processor-based desktop-class machines.

For workstations and "high-performance computing", Penryn is said to provide improvements of:

- 45% for "bandwidth intensive applications
- 25% for servers using Java

These comparisons were made between pre-production Xeon (Penryn) processor vs Xeon 5355 processor-based workstations.

Penryn chips are expected to be released later in 2007.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2007/04/17/intels-penryn-chip-boosts-speeds/
At what point are we going to level out with these chips. I know it's great we just keep getting faster and faster chips, but damn! Every week it seems something better is out, that is **% faster than before.
 
The 15% performance boost in "imaging-related" tasks, i.e. probably the Photoshop and Flash programs of this world, isn't really all that impressive for a processor just under 14% faster in clock speed.

Not that I wouldn't some of these chips, that's just not a very impressive statistic to quote!!
 
DannyBoye said:
At what point are we going to level out with these chips. I know it's great we just keep getting faster and faster chips, but damn! Every week it seems something better is out, that is **% faster than before.
Click to expand...
and yet with all those **% faster chips, i STILL have to wait a long time for all applications to load! :p
 
Oh man !! 3.33GHz!! Thats amazing ! That makes me feel even worse about being on my G5, though i love it :D.
 
DannyBoye said:
At what point are we going to level out with these chips. I know it's great we just keep getting faster and faster chips, but damn! Every week it seems something better is out, that is **% faster than before.
Click to expand...

I believe its called progression :p

We will level out when the chips are so powerful they take over and zap us all into a substance very much like 2000 degree oxtail soup (according to Stephen Hawkings anyway) :p
 
Are their certain hardware requirements to run Leopard? Is this some kind of 64 bit OS? Does whatever hardware upgrades due for the macbooks (santa rosa, display resolution??) going to take full advantage of the new OS, or am I gonna have to put off this major purchase of mine longer?
I don't know about anything...I'm just asking. I use ten year old macs..I haven't a clue. This time around I want to be on top of the technology wave rather than behind!!
 
So how long till these make it in an 8-core mac? Summer, Fall? Who knows? I am ready to purchase the current 8-core right now but man, after this I want to wait b/c a 25% increase in 3-D rendering and 40% in encoding...WOW...got to get back listening to the lecture at NAB! :)
 
theheadguy said:
and yet with all those **% faster chips, i STILL have to wait a long time for all applications to load! :p
Click to expand...

No kidding.

With all the advances in microchips you would think we would be using something other than little disks spinning around to store and read data.

If it feels like 1950's technology, it's because it is...
 
IEatApples said:
I wish we could see these kinds of speed improvements in the HDs & CD/DVD players. :(
Click to expand...

Me, too. But I'm sure a lot of it is just the connectors (SATA, Firewire, etc.) and OS not being able to keep up w/ it.

As far as CD/DVDs, one thing that prevents them from getting faster is just physics. With the discs spinning so faster, if they went any faster, they'd fly apart! But look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein-coated_disc and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc Holographic discs can (theoretically) hold 3.9 TB of data and transfer at 1 gigabit/second while Protein-coated discs can hold 50 TB (don't know what transfer speed is, though)! :eek: :D
 
MacsRgr8 said:
Now, that'll be my next Mac Pro. :cool:
Click to expand...

Same here. A High-end Mac Pro with Penryn chips and 10.5 pre-loaded. Thats my new bar for the next puchase.

tuartboy said:
No kidding.

With all the advances in microchips you would think we would be using something other than little disks spinning around to store and read data.

If it feels like 1950's technology, it's because it is...
Click to expand...

Solid-state memory is only a few years out...
 
Spanky Deluxe said:
The 15% performance boost in "imaging-related" tasks, i.e. probably the Photoshop and Flash programs of this world, isn't really all that impressive for a processor just under 14% faster in clock speed.

Not that I wouldn't some of these chips, that's just not a very impressive statistic to quote!!
Click to expand...
Exactly my thoughts when I saw these numbers... And on Intel's own benchmarks, no less. That said, they did get the clock rate up, so the improvements will be real to the user, even if they aren't a full 15%.

The other thing I don't understand is why they're focusing on graphics related tasks when most of that work is being offloaded to the GPU. Just another reason they need to move to heterogeneous cores. Superscalar and matrix processing don't make sense locked together in a multi-core design competing with yet another processor out on an expansion bus.

Telp said:
Oh man !! 3.33GHz!! Thats amazing ! That makes me feel even worse about being on my G5, though i love it :D.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I feel horrible about my dual 2.5GHz G5. If I knew 3 years ago what I know now, I'd definitely have waited for this fall...
 
When???

it says later 2007...anyone have any clue when we might begin seeing these in Macs???
 
Spanky Deluxe said:
The 15% performance boost in "imaging-related" tasks, i.e. probably the Photoshop and Flash programs of this world, isn't really all that impressive for a processor just under 14% faster in clock speed.

Not that I wouldn't some of these chips, that's just not a very impressive statistic to quote!!
Click to expand...

Do you find this more impressive then? :p

Intel demonstrated its fastest multi-core processor yet at the Spring Intel Development Forum (IDF) in Beijing on Tuesday, an 80-core processor that hit a speedy 2-teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) in a demonstration. More...
 
I don't know about you all, but when I read releases like this I am reminded about how wise the switch to Intel was. IBM was on the verge of getting absolutely flogged, and Steve was let in on that fact.
 
If you use your mac for games, and play at 1920x1200 or higher, these processors wont give you any performance increase. Anything that high in res is 99% video card.
 
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