IDF Day 3 - 32nm Westmere Performance

Clarkdale Performance Preview

Intel showed us a number of benchmarks running on the Clarkdale and Arrandale systems and also supplied us with a number of slides showing Clarkdale's relative performance to a Core 2 Duo E8500 and a Core 2 Quad Q9400 in a number of applications - we've included the slides below.


The company's spokespeople told us that these CPUs were chosen for the comparison because they're the most directly comparable when it comes to the total cost of the platform (at current retail prices). In the tests, the Clarkdale chip was running at 3.33GHz with Turbo Boost enabled, but Intel did not disclose the Turbo Boost speed.


In addition to these slides, we also managed to get a quick Cinebench 10 score for the upcoming Core i5-640 processor, which is clocked at 3.2GHz (according to the benchmark app) and had Hyper-Threading enabled. It managed to score 8,743 in the xCPU benchmark which, looking at the results from our Core i5 and i7 Lynnfield CPU review, is around 10 per cent faster than Intel's fastest dual-core chip to date, the Core 2 Duo E8600.


It's worth noting that these results aren't directly comparable though as the Clarkdale system was running Windows 7 32-bit, while our test systems are running 64-bit Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Of course, we'll be doing a more direct comparison when it comes to reviewing Clarkdale when it launches later this year.

From what we understand, the chips are already heading through the fabs now, so we wouldn't be surprised if Intel started selling Clarkdale and Arrandale-based products around the time Windows 7 hits general availability on October 22nd.