Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700: The Multi-core Era Begins
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 2, 2006 2:14 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Performance per Watt Comparison
3dsmax 7
3dsmax, like many 3D renderers, absolutely loves more cores and here we see Kentsfield maintain a tremendous performance advantage over Conroe. The scores reported are the SPECapc 3dsmax rendering composite in points, higher numbers being better, but the most interesting values are the performance per watt numbers.
Note: we are looking at system power draw rather than trying to isolate just the CPU. In that sense, we are comparing potential of running quad core configurations - i.e. in render farms and the like - instead of more dual core systems. Were we to get just the CPU power usage numbers, we would expect the usage of two identical cores in a single package to basically double power draw.
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 4.11 pts | 192.5W | 0.0214 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 6.59 pts | 230.5W | 0.0286 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 3.77 pts | 189.2W | 0.0199 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 5.96 pts | 225.9W | 0.0264 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 3.39 pts | 184.4W | 0.0184 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 2.68 pts | 176.1W | 0.0152 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 1.85 pts | 174.1W | 0.0106 pts/W |
With higher performance and higher power consumption, the two manage to balance out and result in better performance per watt out of the two Kentsfield based parts than any of the dual core CPUs. While Kentsfield does require more power than Conroe, you get an even larger increase in performance thus resulting in a more efficient overall CPU.
Let's see if this is the start of a trend...
Cinebench 9.5
The Cinebench 9.5 test is also a multithreaded 3D rendering benchmark that will take advantage of as many cores as are present in the system. For each core, Cinebench spawns an additional renderer to help speed up the rendering of a static scene. Performance goes up by over 60% when moving from two to four cores, but once again it's the performance per watt that is particularly interesting:
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 892 pts | 189W | 4.719 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 1337 pts | 225.1W | 5.939 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 816 pts | 186.1W | 4.384 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 1216 pts | 219.8W | 5.532 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 751 pts | 181.8W | 3.973 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 582 pts | 175.4W | 3.127 pts/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 402 pts | 172.2W | 2.334 pts/W |
None of the dual core CPUs can come close to touching the power efficiency of the quad core Kentsfield based offerings.
DivX 6.1
Media encoding applications were the first to get a performance boost from dual core CPUs, but the impact is not nearly as great when we move to quad core processors. There's a gain of around 38%, which is by no means bad, just simply not as great as what we saw in the previous 3D rendering tests. The end result is that performance per watt is a lot closer between the most efficient dual core CPUs and the new quad core offerings:
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 19.4 fps | 189.2W | 0.1027 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 24.8 fps | 223.7W | 0.1108 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 18.0 fps | 185.7W | 0.0968 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 24.0 fps | 220.0W | 0.1089 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 16.3 fps | 183.0W | 0.0864 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 13.8 fps | 176.9W | 0.0745 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 11.2 fps | 170.7W | 0.0658 fps/W |
If we look at performance per watt per transistor, Kentsfield is really not doing well here at all, despite an increase in performance and a continued advantage in performance per watt.
Windows Media Encoder 9
We see a much stronger showing from Kentsfield in the WME9 test, indicating that the DivX test was not representative of all media encoding on quad core.
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 61.5 fps | 189.1W | 0.3252 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 86.4 fps | 223.2W | 0.3870 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 55.8 fps | 184.5W | 0.3025 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 78.9 fps | 218.6W | 0.3608 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 50.4 fps | 181.8W | 0.2665 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 39.4 fps | 176.9W | 0.2137 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 31.3 fps | 171.7W | 0.1822 fps/W |
Quicktime (H.264)
Interestingly enough, our Quicktime H.264 test didn't show any performance improvement going from two to four cores, indicating that the encoding process is optimized for two threads. Quicktime thus becomes the posterchild for what's necessary for the multicore revolution to truly bring about greater power efficiency: better threading within applications.
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 30.0 fps | 191.2W | 0.1569 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 27.5 fps | 210.0W | 0.1309 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 27.5 fps | 188.1W | 0.1461 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 25.2 fps | 207.0W | 0.1216 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 26.5 fps | 185.1W | 0.1430 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 19.8 fps | 177.7W | 0.1113 fps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 16.2 fps | 170.6W | 0.0951 fps/W |
Here the dual core offerings are clearly superior when it comes to performance per watt simply because the Kentsfield CPUs aren't able to outperform them, all while using more power. The efficiency wouldn't be a problem if Kentsfield was able to power down unused cores independently of one another.
iTunes MP3
Our final test is yet another benchmark that only spawns two encoding threads, and we get another example of how power efficiency falls off if the software is not threaded enough to match the CPU's resources.
| CPU | Performance |
Average Power Consumption | Performance per Watt |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) | 11.7 MB/s | 193.4W | 0.0605 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) | 10.9 MB/s | 213.1W | 0.0509 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) | 10.5 MB/s | 188.3W | 0.0557 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) | 9.8 MB/s | 206.8W | 0.0474 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) | 9.8 MB/s | 185.4W | 0.0529 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz) | 7.6 MB/s | 177.0W | 0.0429 MBps/W |
| Intel Core 2 Single Core (2.40GHz) | 6.1 MB/s | 168.4W | 0.0361 MBps/W |
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Sharky974 - Friday, November 3, 2006 - link
Dudes, I remember reading, with detailed benchmarks from a site that specialized in HDD's, that raid array's for speed are COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVICABLY USELESS.It bugs me too, because then as now, people just refuse to accept that fact, even with benchmarks proving it over and over staring them right in the face. RAID DOES NOT SPEED UP YOUR SYSTEM. PERIOD.
If you want to use it for auto backup otoh, fine..
cjb110 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
One question I would like answered, would a quad core help with the gaming and background task usage? (i.e. IM, P2P etc etc) Is Windows intellegent enough to use those cores properly?Reason I ask is I'm planning to go from a 2 pc setup (1 gaming, 1 background tasks) to a single setup, and wondering if quad would be an even better solution for me?
Sunrise089 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Probably not. While this sounds like a good idea, the main benefit in going dual-core is offloading 100% of those background tasts to the second core, so the game gets one core all to itself. Moving from two to four does almost nothing because there isn't anything else to unload. Now, in the future there will be more titles that will use 2 cores, so 4 core chips have their uses, but by then most readers of this site will have upgraded again anyways.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Depends on the background tasks. If you're running something in the background like media encoding, which can already easily use two cores, I would expect quad core to do better. If you're running BitTorrent plus media encoding plus a TV recording application, then I would expect even more benefit if you try to game. Of course, if you're doing all that, you better have a nice HDD configuration as well. RAID 0 with NCQ enabled should suffice.Sunrise089 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Ok, sure, but when most people ask this question they are talking about a game plus IM and anti-virus and maybe a Firefox window. Not all that many people play fullscreen games while encoding files and bittorrenting.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Right, in which case there's little difference, at least right now. When games start coming out that can use multiple cores (not just 2 or even 4), then it could become a lot more important. For now, dual cores is plenty for 99% of people.shabby - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I love it how steve jobs is pimping the intel chip now, before his ppc chips were oh so much faster then intel chips. What a two faced whore...Donegrim - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
But before his ppc chips WERE more powerful than Intel ones. Before the core architecture came into being. Now the core is faster than the ppc, so he is using them. Makes sense really, I'm sure I'd do the same.Griswold - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Nah, he was cursing the whole x86 architecture. By your logic, he could have went with AMD while Intel was touting their netburst furnaces.peternelson - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
"4x4 is an entirely new platform using Socket-1207 (not AM2) CPUs. As much as AMD wants 4x4 to succeed, what we're really waiting for is Barcelona. "HAS AMD ANNOUNCED CLEARLY that 4x4 will be only 1207 and NOT AVAILABLE for AM2?
In earlier announcements it looked like 4x4 would be AM2 (hence speculation about how it could dual socket without extra hypertransport links). PLEASE STATE IF AMD HAVE MADE AN UNAMBIGUOUS STATEMENT OR CLARIFICATION TO THIS EFFECT. Note 4x4 and the acceleration coprocessor tech are two different technologies and might be confused if they are in the same conference/press release or anandtech article.
In any case AMD promised 4x4 during 2006, so we will know the answers real soon ;-)
I think 4x4 will not be nice just for two dualcores, but for have TWO QUADCORES. Now depending on if those quadcores can be AM2 or 1207 or available for either, that will alter the price/performance of AMD's offering.
However I am looking forward to an 8 core system from AMD.