Intel shows off 45nm performance gains

Intel has released additional performance metrics for its Penryn 45nm processors

Intel used its Intel Developer Forum conference in Beijing to release additional performance metrics for its upcoming Penryn 45nm processors scheduled to ship in the second half of this year. 

Gaming and video encoding applications are set to receive a 40 per cent performance boost, the chipmaker claimed.

Imaging related applications can expect to run 15 per cent faster, while 3D rendering is set for a 25 per cent performance rise.

The speed gains are mostly brought about by the new SSE4 instruction set that will be introduced as part of the Penryn processors.  

An instruction set is a collection of commands that a processor understands and is able to execute. The upcoming SSE4 will introduce a set of 50 new instructions, including several that accelerate multimedia applications.

The test compared the latest pre-production Penryn chip running at 3.33GHz, a 1333MHz front side bus and 12MB cache with a Core 2 Extreme processor running at 2.93GHz, a 1066MHz front side bus and 8MB cache. Intel started shipping the latter chip last week.

The new chip will show a 45 per cent performance gain in high performance computing applications.

This increase can be largely attributed to the bigger cache size. High performance computing applications generally benefit most from extra memory on the chip.

Java server applications, meanwhile, demonstrated a 25 per cent performance increase.

The server benchmarks are based on the 2.66GHz Xeon X5355 processors with a 1333MHz front side bus, running against a pre-production 45nm chip with an undisclosed clock speed and 1600MHz front side bus.

Intel said last month that the chip would deliver a 20 to 45 performance boost over the fastest 65nm Core 2 processors that were in the market at that time, but declined to give further details.