Date: October 29th, 2007
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Intel
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INTEL CORPORATE PROFILE
For more than three decades, Intel Corporation has developed technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed the world. Founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products, Intel introduced the world's first microprocessor in 1971. Today, Intel supplies the computing and communications industries with chips, boards, systems, and software building blocks that are the "ingredients" of computers, servers and networking and communications products. These products are used by industry members to create advanced computing and communications systems. Intel's mission is to be the preeminent building block supplier to the Internet economy.
PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
After only four or so months, it seems like yesterday when Intel released the powerful QX6850 onto the market. With its sheer power, there was nothing from any other chip manufacturer that could touch it. But instead of lounging around with the processor market lead, Intel still seems to want to push forward and release yet another ground breaking processor full of the latest innovation in processor technology.
The QX6850 indeed was a blistering fast chip, but with the speed, you had some drawbacks. For one, you have a lot of heat output. The second is power consumption and the third was overall processor die size. The new QX9650 being reviewed today houses Intel's foray into the 45nm world of processor fabrication. The new technology will bring down temperatures, it will be a lot more power efficient and it will be a small overall die size which will allow Intel to utilize that opened space for more on-die cache.
But don't expect a huge leap in overall speed with the QZ9650 seeing this is more of a manufacturing process technology change rather than a huge leap in overall processor
performance at this time. Sure there are some improvements such as the inclusion of the SSE4 instruction set, but there are at this time two programs (DivX 6.6.1 with VirtualDub 1.7.2 &
TMPGenc SSE4 version) that will be supporting the newer specification within the recent foreseen future. The speed is the same at 3.0Ghz and has the same 1333Mhz FSB as the QX6850 although the onboard cache has been increased to 12Mb from the 8Mb seen on any 65nm Kentsfield.
What you will be seeing is performance number equal to or slightly above those seen while benchmarking the QX6850, while at the same time running much cooler and consuming less power. Think of it as a Intel Quad-Core with all the 65nm disadvantages removed. In other words, a win-win situation.
