Wolfdale Performance

Now, let's take a look at the performance of the dual-core Wolfdale processor.

Wolfdale (6MB) vs. Conroe (4MB)

Here, Intel compares a pre-production 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 (Wolfdale) against the 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 (Conroe). The test was done on an Intel DQ35JOE motherboard with 2 GB Micron DDR2-6400 memory on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

Do note that the Wolfdale (E8200) processor is running 333 MHz (14.2 %) faster than the Conroe (E6550) processor in this test. Across the board, the E8200 is about 13-25% faster than the E6550.

If you extrapolate the data, then the Wolfdale processor is really about 11-22% faster than the Conroe at the same clock speed. This is almost entirely due to the 50% larger cache in the Wolfdale processor, with the large 101% boost in DivX 6.6.1 is mostly due to SSE4-optimized code in DivX.

Wolfdale (6MB) vs. Prescott (2MB)

Here, Intel compares a pre-production 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 (Wolfdale) against the 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 630 (Prescott). The test was done on an Intel DQ35JOE motherboard with 2 GB Micron DDR2-6400 memory on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit for the E8200; and an Intel D945GCL motherboard with 2GB Micron DDR2-6400 memory on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

This time, the Wolfdale (E8200) processor is running 333 MHz (11.3 %) slower than the Prescott (630) processor in this test. This really shows the superiority of the Core microarchitecture over Netburst. Even with a slightly slower clock speed, the E8200 is 151-189% faster than the 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 630 processor.

If you extrapolate the data, then the Wolfdale processor is really about 170-213% faster than the Prescott at the same clock speed. The DivX 6.6.1 with its experimental support for SSE4 shows an incredibly large leap in processing power, with the Wolfdale processor delivery over 4x better performance than the Prescott.