Core Duo Laptop CPUs...or Desktop?

Comments from <
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2/core-duo/index.x?pg=1>

"Core Duo is part of Intel's newfangled Centrino platform, code-named
Napa."

The actual comparison bar charts start here, and are surprising...to
say the least.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2/core-duo/index.x?pg=4

Dell new M90 (maybe not quite released) and Apple's MacBook Pro are
just 2 of many new computers coming out the Core Duo CPU, and will it
hold its own against "the pack"...

Only the viewers of the bar charts will know.

Bo

 

Conclusions
Based on what we've seen, one can't help but conclude the Core Duo's
performance per watt is unmatched in the world of PC processors. The
Core Duo is obviously the best mobile CPU on the market, more than
doubling the peak performance of the Pentium M while operating in the
same power envelope. What's more shocking is the fact that the Core Duo
T2600's outright performance is easily superior to Intel's supposed
flagship desktop processor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965.

 

That's one way to read the report, I guess. Another way might be that
you can put AMD Athlon FX 57, FX60 and X2 4800+ in a laptop, all of
which blow the doors off of the Core Duo from a speed point of view.
The lower power consumption levelsof the core duo were impressive, I
have to say. Comparing Core Duo against traditional laptop chips is not
really fair, since the CD will be built into more than just laptops.

Also, looking through the charts, out of 42 tests, there were only 2
where the Core Duo was on top, and 1 where it was on the bottom. Most
of the rest of the game belonged to AMD.

Here are some other quotes from the same article:

We tried overclocking the Core Duo, but when the system wouldn't boot
our stock 2.16GHz processor at 2.3GHz, we were left with no real
tweaking options to help resolve the problem.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2/core-duo/index.x?pg=3 <<= chart
that shows how it compares not too favorably with the Athlon / Opteron chips


With their slower bus speeds and more conservative memory subsystems,
the mobile processors have less peak memory throughput than their
desktop counterparts


Despite its fast L2 cache and relatively high memory bandwidth for a
mobile CPU, the Core Duo's memory access latencies are the highest of
the group.

The T2600 can't quite take the overall performance crown from the likes
of the Athlon 64 FX-60 or the X2 4800+,

 

Just like past years, I understand Intel has the next generation of
"Core Duos" on track for year end delivery.

Progress is continuous.

Bo

 

"In the following, the difference between the overclocked Intel T2600
and AMD FX-60 is less than 1%: Sisoft Sandra 2006 CPU Arithmetic and
CPU Multimedia Benchmarks. And in several others the difference is less
than 5%."

What the hacker-gamer types are seeing is that the CoreDuo is anything
but a shrinking violet. It is easy to expect that Intel will rapidly
increase the clock rate of the CoreDuo as their reliability-consistency
goes up with the 65nm process.

http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2006Apr/wbm20060421035938.htm