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It's been a scant year since Intel released quad-core chips for the consumer desktop market, and now it's ready to update the lineup with the brand-new Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9650, internally code-named Yorkfield. The new chip is smaller, faster, consumes less power, and has more L2 cache than its quad-core predecessors in the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX6xx0 series.
The Intel Core 2 QX9650 features four cores running at 3.0GHz on a 1333MHz front-side bus. The processor has two independent but shared 6MB L2 caches, giving the processor 12MB of L2 cache. The processor will be compatible with motherboards based on Intel's P35 and X38 chipsets.
The Intel Core 2 QX9650 is based on Intel's newest 45mn Penryn microarchitecture. The chip uses hafnium-based high-K dielectrics that allow for smaller gates (and, in turn, smaller transistors) that are more power efficient, faster, and help to lower leakage. Penryn also includes 47 new SSE4 instructions that help improve the performance of games, video encoding, and image processing.
Overall, performance scaled well for the QX9650. The new processor produced higher performance than our older Intel quad-core processors in all of the applications we tested. The Intel Core 2 QX9650 outperformed our other Extreme Processor, Intel Core 2 QX6800, by a decent amount in 3DMark06. The Intel Core 2 QX6700, a 2.66GHz quad-core processor, lagged behind the new chip by almost 20 percent. The QX9650 breezed by with another solid victory in Valve's particle benchmark. When we underclocked the QX9650 to the same speed as the QX6700, it still beat the older quad-core processor by a healthy margin.
Most single-threaded applications generally don't show performance gains with additional processing cores, but the QX9650 showed minor gains in both Oblivion and World in Conflict, most likely due to clock-speed differences and the new Penryn features.
We expect to see the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9650 in stores at or near the traditional $999 Extreme Processor price point. Expect Intel to fill out its quad-core lineup with more affordable versions in the future.
Intel Core 2 QX9650 Performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Intel Core 2 QX9650 Extreme Processor Hands-On Preview
Intel's quad-core QX9650 has arrived. Find out how the newest Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor performs.
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