Conclusion

So, Ketsfield may turn out extremely efficient in applications that can create parallel multi-threaded workload. Unfortunately, there are not that many tasks yet that could work this way. However, by launching this quad-core monster into the world Intel definitely creates very favorable grounds for the new stage in software development ?parallel data processing. And the game developers will be the first ones to take real action in this direction, because at this time no game can rally load all the four cores of the Kentsfield processor.

Nevertheless, if you are into 3D modeling or video editing, then it would definitely make sense to upgrade to a quad-core platform as soon as you can. Conroe processors have set a new performance bar for the high-end systems and Kentsfield raises this bar even higher. The performance level you couldn?t even dream of a year ago can now be easily conquered by the new quad-core Kentsfield processor.

I would like to specifically stress that the introduction of quad-core Kentsfield processors will also improve the performance-per-watt ratio significantly. According to Intel, these CPUs shouldn?t consume much more power than the top Conroe processors. At the same time, the performance growth may reach up to 80% (if the applications are well optimized, of course), which we have just see in our preliminary test session.

Well, I would like to wind up our Kentsfield Performance Preview here. Very soon we will be able to offer you a detailed coverage where we will reveal more details, especially since some of the very acute questions haven?t been touched upon today at all. One of the most interesting questions would be the workload distribution across the computational cores with the shared or separate cache that may affect the performance in certain applications.