Single Core BenchmarksThe following benchmarks will show you the advantage of the newer Penryn 45nm core with 6Mb L2 over the older Conroe. While these results will not be 100% identical to the final Penryn CPUs, the single core results will be very close.
We disabled the extra cores in Windows and ran through the benchmarks with only 1 core enabled, since both CPUs are running at the same frequency, any difference found can be attributed to the 50% extra L2 cache and other silicon improvements:
SuperPi really reacts well to the extra L2 cache, the QX9650 is ~12% better. Wprime shows less difference but still 6%. The attentive reader might have noticed that the Super Pi 1M result with 1 core enabled is slightly higher compared to having all cores enabled; the difference is negligible, but it’s there.
Next up is the x264 encoding benchmark:
Higher is better, and the QX9650 manages to outdo the E6850 in this benchmark as well, between 5~11%.
Last up are the Futuremark 3DMarks:
Strangely enough in the 3DMark2001SE benchmark which has no multi core support, the score drops by quite a lot for the E6850, the QX9650 also scores lower but the drop is less spectacular. The results for 3DMark06 are lower as expected; the difference is minimal in favor of the QX9650.
Overclocking next ->