New CPUs from Intel - FSB speeded up
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 30 Jul 2007

Intel decided to refresh its Core 2 lineup before the summer. The biggest news is that the FSB frequency was increased to 1333MHz. General opinion among enthusiasts is that the 1066MHz was limiting the previous Core 2 CPUs, and we agree with that. And while we're very impatiently waiting for the new Penryn CPU's to show up, let's take a look at the new CPUs.

Many people will say that Intel's GTL BUS is inferior to AMD's HT, but those statements should be used very carefully. The two busses mentioned are very different, and it's not easy to compare them. One of the big advantages of Intel's GTL bus is that it's not a point-to-point bus like AMD's HT. Ever wondered why AMD didn' pull out the same stunt like Intel and came out with quad-core CPU's that are actually two dual-core CPUs? The answer is: Because thay can't, mainly due to the fact that HT doesn't support it. Part of the reason is that the memory controller is integrated into the CPU, but that could be worked around. But let's get back at Intel, their architecture stresses the FSB a lot more than AMD because all the memory operation use FSB. Intel was able to compensate for that by implementing a good prefetch logic onto thr Core 2 CPUs, but that doesn't solve the problem. DDR2 increased the memory bandwidth quite a bit, and was way over what Intel's FSB could handle, so it was needed to increase the bandwidth of the FSB. The easiest way to do this is to increase the frequency of the bus, and that is exactly what Intel did. Since all Core 2 CPUs are able to work at FSB speeds way over 1333MHz the only real work needed to be done on the quad-core line. Aparently, the new core stepping did the job and here we are.

We got two samples, E6750 and QX6850. We used our standard testbed to check the performance of these:
- EVGA 680i SLI Black Pearl
- OCZ SLI-Ready DDR2-1066
- OCZ PowerXstream 1000W
- OCZ GeForce 8800GTX
- WD Raptor 150GB

Our system was water cooled with a home made water cooling set featuring some interesting parts (like golf 2 radiator...). We had to update the BIOS in order to get the board working properly with the new CPUs.