When we compared AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 and the new Phenom 9000 quad core processor last month, we forced Windows to utilize only a single processing core, in an effort to understand the real performance differences between the AMD64 architecture and the Stars architecture of the Agena/Barcelona core. Depending on the particular benchmark, the results made clear that Phenom is indeed up to 20% faster than Athlon in a core to core comparison, thanks to its optimizations and the L3 cache. In addition to these performance gains, Phenom’s unified quad core design and smart cache architecture should provide more benefits under heavily threaded conditions. We haven’t looked at the performance difference using all processing cores, as you will find this information in our launch article “Phenom 9700, AMD’s 1st Quad Core CPU”.
(Full article ‘Phenom vs. Athlon Core Scaling Compared’)

Intel plans to increase the performance of individual cores in the Itanium processor, and not just increase the number of cores to it, says an Intel engineer.

Speaking at the Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo held in Singapore on Tuesday, Cameron McNairy, principal engineer of Itanium Processor Architect at Intel, said: “We have not abandoned single-core performance and we’re looking to increase that with each generation [of the Itanium processor] as we go forward, some with greater transitions than others.”

Referring to the generation move from Itanium 2 9M to dual-core Itanium 2, McNairy said: “We made several changes, even though the core was essentially the same.”

Citing examples of the changes, he added: “We separated the instruction cache from the data cache, simplified some of the conflicts in the data cache, [and] increased core resources.”

The Itanium 2 9M chip, which debuted in November 2004, is an upgraded member of the Madison line.

(Full article ‘Intel to boost single-core performance’)

Even though the transition to improved Intel Core 2 micro-architecture with the new chips due to be available late this year is not typically considered as substantial for Intel Corp., a web-site, which managed to test an engineering sample of the chip reported up to 115% performance gains for the new products from the worldВ’s largest chipmaker compared to current offerings.

According to a report from HKEPC web-site, Intel Core 2 Duo В“WolfdaleВ” (2.33GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz processor system bus) performs from 0.22% to 115% faster compared to Intel Core 2 Duo В“ConroeВ” processor (2.33GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 1333MHz PSB). Typically, the

(Full article ‘Intel’s New 45nm Chips Up to Two Times Faster than Current, Claims Report’)