Today, Intel formally launched its 45nm Penryn based processors. The press release is available here in case you missed it. Concurrent with the press release, Intel made available this link comparing 45nm Penryn CPU performance vs Intel's existing 65nm and AMD's existing K8 and K10 (rev 10h, Barcelona) based designs across a wide variety of benchmarks spanning Integer, FP, HPC, Database/OLTP, ERP, Web, Media, and Virtualization.
Not only do Intel's performance results dominate and blow away the competition, but Intel also has stated that Penryn products are available between now and the next 45 days, which is 180 degrees opposite the AMD Barcelona launch experience. This Tech Report article summarizes the available Penryn SKUs along with pricing information.
Let's take a look at a couple of examples of Intel's Penryn performance:
Source: Intel
Remember when AMD was making a bunch of noise earlier this year about how it was going to blow away Intel in SPECfp_Rate2006 with simulated Barcelona numbers? With Penryn, it appears that Intel blows away its own 65nm quads as well as deliver AMD's forthcoming Opteron "true quad core" Barcelona at 2.5GHz a "nice try" message.
Lets look at another benchmark: SPECjbb20005
Source: Intel
In SPECjbb2005, you see that the Penryn Quad-Core Xeon X5460 @ 3.16GHz system provides about 21% higher throughput than Intel's existing Quad-Core Xeon X5365 "Clovertown" system @ 3GHz. Where is AMD's Barcelona quad comparison? Perhaps AMD has not gotten an OEM or themselves to publish numbers because they know better. The best that could be done in this case is to compare against the existing Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2224SE @ 3.2GHz publication, which Intel's existing 65nm Intel Dual-Core 5160 "Woodcrest" trounce handily.
I could spend the rest of the space in this post talking about the Penryn Desktop performance numbers or links to other articles on the web...but I won't and leave it as an exercise for you to find using your favorite search engine :).
In other news, over at Circus Maximus, Sharikou has officially gone mad. In a desperate attempt to paper over Intel's Penryn product launch blitzkrieg, Sharikou rushed his post, titled "The world gorws (sic) up with AMD" out. A word of advice to Sharikou: if you are going to mock, at least use a spell checker. This is not the first time you've been caught with a fumbled headline. And please give credit/citation to the source of the materials you post in your, er, "blog". Doesn't every "journalist" know how to do these two simple things? In my world, real journalists get disciplined or fired for plagiarizing work or for lack of basic English spelling skills.
Update: Sharikou scrambled again tonight and posted anew to try and deflect Penryn with this lame post and managed to screw up the title yet again: "Intel's 3GHZ Penryn ia (sic) almost slower than 2GHz K10". Doesn't this babbling idiot learn?
In summary, Intel has pulled a coup with Penryn. Not only does it blow away anything the competition has to offer at attractive price, power, and performance points but it has actual CPUs available at launch, something that AMD should find sobering.
Now, who is it again that is going BK?
