Yorkfield Performance

Now, let's take a look at some performance Yorkfield and Wolfdale results from Intel. Let's start with the quad-core Yorkfield performance comparisons.

Yorkfield XE (12MB) vs. Kentsfield XE (8MB)

Intel pitted a pre-production 3.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Yorkfield XE) against the current desktop performance leader, the 3.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (Kentsfield XE). The test was done on an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe motherboard with 2 GB Corsair DDR3-1333 memory and an eVGA GeForce 8800 GTX on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

Since both processors were running at the same speed, the Yorkfield XE (QX9650) processor's larger 12 MB L2 cache allowed it to deliver a 5-10% increase in performance across the board. The large 60% boost in DivX 6.6 was mostly thanks to the implementation of SSE4-optimized code in DivX.

Yorkfield (12MB) vs. Kentsfield (8MB)

Next, Intel put a pre-production 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (Yorkfield) against the 2.40 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Kentsfield). The test was done on an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe motherboard with 2 GB Corsair DDR3-1333 memory and an eVGA GeForce 8800 GTX on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

Do note that the Yorkfield (Q9450) processor is running 260 MHz (10.8 %) faster than the Kentsfield (Q6600) processor in this test. With that said, the Yorkfield processor is about 13-23% faster than the Kentsfield.

If you extrapolate the data, then the Yorkfield processor is really about 12-21% faster than the Kentsfield at the same clock speed. This is almost entirely due to the 50% larger cache in the Yorkfield processor. The very large 81% boost in DivX 6.6.1 is again mostly due to SSE4-optimized code in DivX.