Core 2 Duo Notebooks - Intel Core2Duo T7600 Benchmark

Core 2 Duo for notebooks now available

29/08/06

Intel on Monday announce availability of its mobile Core 2 Duo processor tailored for laptops, thus completing a rollout of its 64-bit dual-core processor range.
Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and others trotted out their first systems based on the notebook version of the chip, formerly code-named Merom. Merom systems were previewed at Intel's Core 2 Duo launch event in July, but systems are now available for order from PC companies.
The company announced that nearly 200 laptop models worldwide would incorporate the new chip into their designs.
"This is the closing of the circle, of Intel moving in the client space to the Core architecture," said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobile platforms group.
Intel has junked its older Netburst architecture chips for desktops and servers in favor of the more powerful yet power-efficient Core architecture inspired by previous notebook processors such as the Pentium M and the Core Duo.
The Intel Core 2 Duo is said to be about 20 percent faster than its socket-compatible predecessor, the Core Duo, while consuming less power and generating less heat and is the first 64-bit notebook processor to come off Intel's production line.
The Core 2 Duo technology uses two processing "brains" to handle multiple tasks at once -- speeding up performance while minimizing power consumption. As a result, makers are able to create sleeker, smaller systems that don't produce as much heat as traditional laptops and excel at multimedia and gaming activities.
The mobile version of the Core 2 Duo shares the same product name as its desktop counterpart, but the individual chips will have different model number schemes. The new notebook chips fall into a 5xxx or 7xxx model number range, with 7000-series processors offering more performance. The desktop chips use model numbers in the 4xxx and 6xxx range. The letter before the four-digit model number signifies how much power the chip consumes; mobile chips like the T7600 fall in a range of 25 watts to 41 watts of power consumed. The T7600 consumes 34 watts, a little more than the 31 watts consumed by the Core Duo.
The Core 2 Duo T5000 (2 MB L2 Cache) and T7000 (4 MB L2 Cache) are expected to be positioned on the very high-end of notebooks for some time and at least until AMD/ATI will be able to catch up with the perfoemance of Intel's (last generation) Core Duo processor. All new Core 2 Duo notebooks are based on the current Intel 945 Express chipset family and the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG network chip - which are typically referred to as Napa platform and that have been used with the preceding Core Duo as well.
The rollout of Merom now throws the pressure on to AMD, which has had the edge in notebook chips with its 64-bit Turon chips, to lower prices.

Benchmark Results:

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 13a

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer was developed from DKBTrace 2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people (called the POV-Team) in their spare time. It is an high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions on using the ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to start from scratch. In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the shape or material name in your scene.
The most significant change from the end-user point of view between versions 3.6 and 3.7 is the addition of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support, which in a nutshell allows the renderer to run on as many CPU's as you have installed on your computer. This will be particularly useful for those users who intend purchasing a dual-core CPU or who already have a two (or more) processor machine. On a two-CPU system the rendering speed in some scenes almost doubles. For our benchmarking we used version 3.7 as all of the processors we are testing today are dual-core.
Once rendering on the object we selected was completed, we took the score from dialog box, which indicates the average PPS for the benchmark. A higher PPS indicates faster system performance.

The pixel rate counter (PPS) in POV-Ray is based off of the number of pixels rendered in the current frame divided by the total amount of time spent on the whole animation. This gives the effect of dividing the true pixels per second by the current frame number. With POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 13a we are able to look at a recent SMP benchmark to judge the differences between Yonah and Merom. The benchmark shows that the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7600 easily takes the win over The T2600 processor.

Sisoft; Sandra 2007 SR1

Sisoft; Sandra 2007 SR1:

SiSoftware, founded in 1995, is one of the leading providers of computer analysis, diagnostic and benchmarking software. The flagship product, known as "SANDRA", was launched in 1997 and has become one of the most widely used products in its field. SANDRA is used by almost 400 world-wide IT publications, magazines, review sites to analyse the performance of today’s computers.
Multi-Core Support: As well as SMP (multi-processor) and SMT (multi-threading/Hyper-Threading) support we have added multi-core support for future AMD and Intel CPUs. The benchmarks have been optimised to schedule the optimum number of threads on the optimum (virtual) CPU on both multi-core and Hyper-Threaded computers.

Running the Sandra multimedia benchmark we find that the T2600 has an Interger score of 33,598 it/s and a Float score of 45,727.  While this score is good the T7600 has an Interger score of 127,767 and a Float score of 69,285.

CineBench 9.5 and Super PI

MAXON; CINEBENCH 9.5:

CINEBENCH 9.5 is the free benchmarking tool for Windows and Mac OS based on the powerful 3D software CINEMA 4D R8. The tool is set to deliver accurate benchmarks by testing not only a computer's raw processing speed but also all other areas that affect system performance such as OpenGL, multithreading, multiprocessors and Intel's new HT Technology. Again, higher Frames/Second and lower rendering time in seconds equal better performance.

Our Cinebench 9.5 results show again how the T7600 just reigns supreme over the T2600, completing the benchmark at an 17% faster pace in single CPU benchmark and 18% in the SMP results.  The T7600 looks like it's doing well so far!

Super Pi Mod Version 1.5 XS:

Super Pi calculates the number Pi in this raw number crunching benchmark. The benchmark is fairly diverse and allows the user to change the number of digits of Pi that can be calculated. In this benchmark we ran Super Pi to 1 million places.

When it came to Super Pi the T7600 was able to beat the T2600 by 6 seconds, which is a 21% improvement in time.  Not too shabby for all those for the lowest super pi scores.  Just imagaine a T7600 in a desktop board and overclocked!  

Futuremark 3DMark06

3DMark 2006 v1.2.0

3DMark06 includes an array of 3D graphics, CPU and 3D feature tests for overall performance measurement of current and future PC gaming systems. With this broader design approach, 3DMark06 has become the benchmark of choice for all PCs with top-of-the-line graphics hardware and CPUs. 3DMark06 is the first product from Futuremark using the AGEIA PhysX software physics library in two very complex, game-like threaded CPU tests conceived to measure properly performances of single processor, multi-core and multiple processor systems in next generation of games. In addition to using real-time physics, both CPU tests also employ multi-threaded artificial intelligence algorithms. By combining the results of the two CPU tests and four graphics tests, 3DMark06 enables users to get a 3DMark score which reflects the overall gaming performance of their PC

It looks like the extra speed and cache don't do much for Merom in the graphics intensive 3DMark06 benchmark, but the overall socre did increase nearly 100 points and the CPU score jumped up 219 points, which is a 12% performance increase on the CPU.

A closer look the two CPU tests in 3DMark06 show that the T7600 takes the lead by a hair, but that's good enough for the 12% gain seen in the overall CPU score. 

Comanche 4

NovaLogic; Comanche 4:

The Comanche 4 benchmark demo is a unique benchmark as it represents a real-world gaming experience. It contains the single player Eagle's Talon mission from the game as well as a detailed cinematic. This DirectX 8.1 benchmark demo measures your system's performance in the standard frames per second format. This game is very old, but even today it is one of the best gaming benchmarks to show raw CPU performance.

We ran Comanche 4 at four different resolutions and believe it or not at all resolutions we were CPU limited!  The Core Duo Processor T2600 scored 78 frames per second across the board, but that couldn't touch the 105 frames per seconds that the Core 2 Duo Processor T7600 hit home. This is a 27 frame per second difference, which is good for a 34.6% performance boost in this CPU restricted benchmark. Comance 4 is an old game,and doesn't support dual-core processors (SMP), but I still love it for reasons like this.

Power Consumption and Final Thoughts

When it came to power consumption of the entire notebook at idle and under load the results were actually shocking.  Still using the Dell XPS M1710 notebook we noted that the Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7600 idled around 41-42W, which was roughly 2W better than it's predecessor. To figure out the load power consumption levels we ran Prime 95 and 3DMark06 and recorded the highest Watt reading that flashed up on the Seasonic Power Angel meter.  Here we found the T7600 consumed more power, but only 3W more!

For the short period of time that we have had Core 2 Duo processors on the test bench they have been a welcome addition to the Intel mobile processor family.  The Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7600 without a doubt performed better than our Core Duo processor T2600, but you have to keep in mind that it has a higher clock speed also.  While the 166MHz difference in core frequency might not seem like much it is something that needs to be noted.  It would have been nice to have the Core Duo processor T2700 to compare it to since it too runs at 2.33GHz , but unfortunately we don't have an unlimited budget and Intel didn't send us one to try out.
For gamers the Core 2 Duo processor family is a step in the right direction, but we only advise upgrading to a Merom processor if you have at least an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Go or an ATI X1800 graphics solution in your laptop.  As you can see from our performance data at high resolutions the GPU is bottlenecking performance so playing WoW or Oblivion at 1920x1200 will put you at roughly the same frame per second count as before. 
For part time gamers and those who do general multimedia things like encoding then Core 2 Duo makes the most sense for you.  As seen in POV-Ray, Cinebench, and Super Pi the Core 2 Dup performs better than Core 2 across the board and will be able to crunch data faster, which means you can play more games after your work is done!
Overall Merom is just a speed bump in the mobile lineup for Intel, but does at 64 bit support and offers double the cache of the pervious generation.  I can't wait for the move to 45nm and the Santa Rosa platform that is coming up down the road.  Intel has always had a strong mobile processor and Merom does not dissapoint!
Legit Bottom Line: Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) processors improve performance across the board and does so with nearly the same power consumption of their previous mobile processor.

Source: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/381/3/