Intel Shows Off 8-Core 45nm Penryn Benchmarks

Intel Deals Another Blow – Is It Deadly?

This morning at Computex, Intel held a very small and private tech session that was aimed at showing off what a pair of their upcoming 45nm Penryn processors could do in their famed V8 test system that we first showed you back at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. Just a couple months ago at the Beijing Intel Developers Forum, Intel let the media benchmark a single 3.33GHz Penryn processor and we found it to be a monster. It seems that Intel was trying to bury the hatchet firmly in AMD’s back and they might have succeeded in their mission this morning.

It was all smiles from Intel Senior Performance Analyst Francois Piednoel as he just finished running benchmarks with the V8 system which was running a pair of 3.00GHz Penryn processors that offered a combined total cache size of 24MB (12MB per processor).

With all eight 3GHz cores ready for action and 16,358MB of FB-DIMM memory installed in the motherboard the Vista Ultimate 64-bit test system was ready for benchmarking!

One of the highlights of the benchmarking was Cinebench release 10, where the Intel V8 test system scored 22,936 at 3.0GHz. Let’s take a look and see how that compares to some other Intel processors.

The V8 Penryn test system at 3GHz scaled nicely against the dual-core and quad-core 3.33GHz Penryn processors as well at the Core 2 Extreme QX6800 quad-core processor. AMD wouldn’t comment on the record on what their upcoming Barcelona processor would score, but people in the know said that AMD is getting ~16,000 with a pair of their Barcelona processors on Cinebench 10. If this proves to be true and you keep in mind that the 45nm Penryn V8 system is underclocked right now and scoring ~23,000 on the same benchmark it means things could get interesting really soon.

At the end of the day it was all smiles from Matt Dunford (Performance Benchmarking Manager), Mahmoud Khroashadi (Performance Benchmarking) and Francois Piednoel (Senior Performance Analyst) as they all believe that the performance race between Penryn and Barcelona is already over before it’s even started.

I guess it’s all how you see things, but right now Intel firmly believes that they are driving away from the competition. Who knows if they are right or if they just have a good marketing team. Either way you look at it Intel has raised the bar and it’s now up to AMD to fire back if they can!