DailyTech - "Kentsfield" to Debut at 2.66GHz

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Hardware "Kentsfield" to Debut at 2.66GHz
Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - August 16, 2006 10:43 PM

53 comment(s) - last by RMSe17.. on Sep 26 at 11:56 PM

Four 2.66GHz Intel CPUs on a single package for just a grand

Intel's newest roadmap started making the rounds last week, and the headline title across the roadmap was absolutely Kentsfield, Intel's upcoming quad-core processor. During last month's investor call, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced the chips would be shipping this year, as opposed to Q1'07 that was originally slated on the roadmap.

Now a few additional details of Kentsfield have slipped out. Intel's most recent roadmap claims Kentsfield, which will ship as a Core 2 Extreme branded processor, will run each core at 2.66GHz and a 1066MHz front-side bus. Essentially, the processor is two Core 2 Duo E6700 processors packaged onto a single CPU.

There is no announced ship date of Kentsfield yet, though Intel has announced that the processor will ship for $999 -- the same as every other "Extreme" processor the company has announced. Intel has no price cuts for the E6700 processor planned until after the quad-core Kentsfield launch as well. Since the E6700 has a distributor price of $530, the Kentsfield actually offers some discount for the second core.

Absentees from Intel's roadmaps include a 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme processor. The company officially stated that such a processor would follow the existing 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme that is available today. However, it seems fairly evident that the quad-core Kentsfield has
supplanted any new dual-core Extreme processors.

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RE: Fast Forward?

By defter on 8/17/2006 9:03:23 AM , Rating: 2

This is obviously positioned against AMD's 4x4. People who are considering those FX/EE chips don't care much about the money.

Still, Kentsfield would provide quite excellent price/performance in multithreaded tasks like rendering which don't need a lot of memory bandwidth. For about $1100 you would get an ok motherboard and a quad core running at 2.67GHz. For the comparison, currently two 2.33GHz Xeons and motherboard would cost >$1200 and you would need to add extra for FB-DIMM memory.

BTW, when Kentsfield will be released, 90% of Intel's performance desktop CPUs (not counting Celerons) will be dual core.

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RE: Fast Forward?

By epsilonparadox on 8/17/2006 9:32:27 AM , Rating: 2

According to Anandtech's review of the Mac Pro, the performance increase from single core to dual core was tangible but the increase from dual core to quad core was not. The I/O became the bottleneck for increased performance. Wouldn't the same happen on the PC side even though the Kentsfield is two conroes in the same package instead of two woodcrest processors?

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RE: Fast Forward?

By finalfan on 8/17/2006 1:48:45 PM , Rating: 2

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816&p...

CineBench 9.5, 1 core vs 2 core vs 4 core

440 828 1437
=> 1760 1656 1437
=> 100% 94% 82%

To me the performace increase from 2 core to 4 core is more than tangible

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