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Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Review - 45nm Era Begins
The 45nm era has finally arrived and Intel will be launching the next generation Extreme edition CPU, the QX9650. In this review, we will be taking a look at how this 3GHz QX9650 stack up against similarly clocked QX6850 and E6850. It will be interesting to see how the 4MB, 8MB and 12MB L2 cache processors perform and if the micro-architecture enhancements on the Yorkfield will aid it in the real world benchmarks.
DivX converter is pretty much single-threaded but still QX9650 is able to encode slightly faster. Having more cores certainly helps speed things up in H.264 Encoder and VirtualDub apps.
Updated : We re-ran VirtualDub 1.7.6.1 again with Experimental SSE4 full search enabled with the QX9650 and SSE2 for the rest of the processors. Now we are able to observe quite a boost when we compress a MPEG file into higher compression DivX using VirtualDub 1.7.6 w/ DivX 6.7 codec. Certainly, the 2 new SSE4 instructions, PHMINPOSUW and MPSADBW on QX9650 speed up the whole encoding process. We will re-examine the applications again in greater details and hopefully we can get to test out upcoming TMPEGnc Xpress 4 that supports SSE4 on next week. More SSE4 supported applications to come along next year.
