Some of the benchmarks from the new Barcelona and related cores are
starting to leak out. Of course our friends at the Inquirer are the ones
doing the leaking here. The following article has a lot of people
twittering right now.
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=41970
In it, we see that Theo has a Phenom FX running at 2.5Ghz, and it
achieves a 3DMark06 score of 23,768, which is pretty respectable.
However, what's really impressive is that when he runs the same thing at
3.0Ghz, the score just jumps to 30,031! That means for only a 20% clock
speed increase, he got a 26% performance increase!!! A frequency scaling
efficiency of 130%! WTF?!?
For comparison, the current world record holder in 3DMark06 is a
hyper-overclocked Intel quad-core rig, running an Extreme Edition QX6850
overclocked from 3.0Ghz to 5.1Ghz!!! This one could only achieve 27,000
on 3DMark06, despite 70% higher CPU speeds, and the video cards
overclocked even more than the Phenom.
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=38288
Naturally everybody thinks Theo must've screwed up (and he may still
have, it is the Inquirer afterall), and calling shens on this. However,
there's some discussion here that these results may not be anomalous.
Gary Key over at Anandtech says that this chip really does not get into
a real groove until reaches over 2.4Ghz, and it requires really
low-latency ram (like DDR2-1066 @ CAS4, or DDR2-1333 @ CAS5).
http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...VIEWTMP=Linear
Yousuf Khan
Similar Threads
