IDF 09 SF: More On Clarkdale & Arrondale

[Rob Williams]

During a private meeting with Intel during IDF 09, more details were divulged about their upcoming Westmere architecture, which includes the Clarkdale desktop and Arrandale mobile chips. Although most of the information has been speculated for a while, we have some initial performance and power consumption details, and things are looking quite good.

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

[gibbersome]

Wouldn't a 50% increase in GPU performance still be too little, too late for Intel?

The Arrondale will be a good boost over current mobile offerings. I'm not entirely convinced about Clarksdale.

[Kougar]

Originally Posted by gibbersome

Wouldn't a 50% increase in GPU performance still be too little, too late for Intel?

Well, all the thing is designed to do is power the GUI, the graphical interface you click and interact with, along with offering some hardware acceleration with video. It's still not targeting games.

This is almost getting cliche because everyone references this exact argument, but it's so true... 50% of a small number is still a tiny number. A 50% gain on 6FPS would mean it got 9FPS... or 16FPS becomes 24FPS... it's honestly just not going to matter. Intel has gotten used to spinning the numbers/marketing to try and gloss over their IGP's shortcomings.

Still, I'm looking forward to Arrandale simply for the power savings it should bring... Core 2 Duo's lack Nehalem's power gating and PCU controller. Arrandale will not only be smaller, but will be able to shut parts of itself off and manage its own power states better. Removing the northbridge should only help lower the system power consumption too...

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Kougar

This is almost getting cliche because everyone references this exact argument, but it's so true... 50% of a small number is still a tiny number. A 50% gain on 6FPS would mean it got 9FPS... or 16FPS becomes 24FPS

That's just it... the improvements are not going to be too noticeable. There's a reason Intel stressed that the games they speak about are those like Spore. Still, gaming aside, I really want to see its 1080p performance. NVIDIA has a good thing with ION on the SFF side, so maybe Clarkdale will allow Intel to rightfully take back the crown.

[Kougar]

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

That's just it... the improvements are not going to be too noticeable. There's a reason Intel stressed that the games they speak about are those like Spore. Still, gaming aside, I really want to see its 1080p performance. NVIDIA has a good thing with ION on the SFF side, so maybe Clarkdale will allow Intel to rightfully take back the crown.

Or in the very least, Intel will no longer have any excuse about the difficulties in getting proper HD offloading anymore...