Yonah article here on Anandtech

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

I am a little disappointed by the Yonah numbers. At 65nm and all the additions I thought it would give a little better showing than that, but it does at least compete with AMD. I love the smell of competition in the early morning ... err late evening.

Edit: The power numbers do look very good but not exactly overwhelming considering the 65nm advantage. If AMD matches their power numbers with their dualcore Turions at 90nm in Q1 '06 than Intel should be worried considering AMD still has 65nm.

 

[dmens]

Pretty good for a power-conscious laptop part. Can't wait to get the powerbook.

 

[Furen]

I suppose I'll repeat some of the stuff I said on the article's comments:

Very good power consumption but I must say that this "preview" made me think that AMD can actually match this on 90nm tech. Why? Well, Yonah on a mobile chipset has 25% lower power consumption compared to a "high-voltage" X2 on a desktop motherboard. Quite nice but nothing that AMD can't tweak down to, and this is at load, at idle the difference is only 16%.

That said I think that Yonah is very good in that it gets Intel within striking distance to AMD. I doubt Yonah will surpass AMD's performance with ANY edition of Yonah but if Conroe can increase the performance by 10% or so then AMD will have to go 65nm to match Intel's CPUs (to clock them A64s higher).

 

[StrangerGuy]

Disappointing performance but at least Intel did awesome in the power consumption department.

 

[dmens]

I doubt Yonah will surpass AMD's performance with ANY edition of Yonah

True, but yonah is deliberately crippled.

 

[stevty2889]

Now where is the new Asus CT-479 adaptor that will let me put on in my SFF system and overclock it. My 1.6ghz dothan @2.4ghz is great for gaming. The pentium-M seems to scale well with clockspeed, so I'd love to get my hands on a dual core yonah just to play with. It may be no X2, but it's a lot better than the pentium-D.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: Furen
Very good power consumption but I must say that this "preview" made me think that AMD can actually match this on 90nm tech. Why? Well, Yonah on a mobile chipset has 25% lower power consumption compared to a "high-voltage" X2 on a desktop motherboard. Quite nice but nothing that AMD can't tweak down to, and this is at load, at idle the difference is only 16%.

The total power of an entire Yonah "system" with unknown components uses 25% less power, including a high-end video card. But looking at system power obscures the CPU difference. Yonah looks like a 20W part or less, which would give it a significant power advantage over a single core Turion.

 

[Furen]

Celerons are deliberately crippled, Yonah is the best Intel can put out that can maintain reasonable power consumption. It is optimized for power over performance but its main limiting factors are issues with the micro-architecture itself, not issues with the low FSB or the lack of cache, or slow cache or anything of the sort. Intel can clock these high up there if it wants to (and it might, in the guise of the "E" edition) but will probably hit a ceiling with them before the 14-stage SOI A64s do, as long as AMD continues tweaking at a reasonable pace.

 

[Furen]

Originally posted by: Accord99

The total power of an entire Yonah "system" with unknown components uses 25% less power, including a high-end video card. But looking at system power obscures the CPU difference. Yonah looks like a 20W part or less, which would give it a significant power advantage over a single core Turion.

A high-end video card idling, which most of them do reasonably well (if the card was in use then the swing between idle and load would be much higher, since high-end video cards draw lots of power at load).

 

[Brunnis]

Originally posted by: Furen
I suppose I'll repeat some of the stuff I said on the article's comments:

Very good power consumption but I must say that this "preview" made me think that AMD can actually match this on 90nm tech. Why? Well, Yonah on a mobile chipset has 25% lower power consumption compared to a "high-voltage" X2 on a desktop motherboard. Quite nice but nothing that AMD can't tweak down to, and this is at load, at idle the difference is only 16%.

You're forgetting that Anand's power consumption figures are for the whole system. The CPU is just a part of those numbers and this makes the actual difference between the CPUs much larger.

By the look of those figures, and comparing them to others I've seen, it seems as if Yonah uses some 25W under load. The X2 3800+ is more like 50-55W under load. There is no way that AMD can match Yonah or even come close. The best we can hope for with a simple voltage drop is probably something in the 40-45W range.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: Furen

Originally posted by: Accord99
A high-end video card idling, which most of them do reasonably well (if the card was in use then the swing between idle and load would be much higher for Yonah, since high-end video cards draw lots of power at load).

Most don't idle that well, 6800GTs/Ultras and X800/X850XTs idle well in the 20+W range.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Performance looks pretty decent. Probably not as good as I'd have hoped for on 65nm, but finally brings Intel near AMD's dual-core performance (the X2 3800+ at least). The things I worry about at this point are the viability of Yonah as a desktop CPU - availability (and quality) of motherboards, overclocking ability, and also price. If they can address those issues, it might be pretty nice for a desktop system if the price is right. That said, I'm not worried that I'll feel like replacing my Opteron 170 any time soon

Of course, the power consumption is very nice...might allow for real battery life with a "real" processor in a laptop.

 

[Furen]

If you guys remember GamePC's very old Turion review, it had the Turion on a Lan Party NF3 250GB. It idled 21W higher than a Dothan and loaded around 30W higher. If you look at notebook-to-notebook comparisons these two chips probably match each other (Dothan is a bit better but nothing dramatic), so it's important to know that motherboard makes a HUGE difference. That said I just reread the review and, though it mentions "Intel's new mobile 945G", it doesnt say whether or not the chipset on the board is the mobile version or the current 945.

Anyway, my point was that Turion shaved around 30W power consumption off 90nm parts and that if AMD can pull off something similar with it's dual-cores then it'll have something competitive to Yonah, even without going 65nm.

 

[ahock]

hopefully we can see the 50W above version of Yonah.... This will make it equal with X2.... The benchmark shown is a a mobile part which seems to be expected as mobile processor performance is sacrificed for power..... But pretty decent.....

 

[Furen]

Well, I'm mostly disappointed by the somewhat lackluster SSE/FPU improvements. Intel has been hyping this up so much that I kind of expected Yonahs to crush everything out there at this.

 

[dmens]

It is optimized for power over performance but its main limiting factors are issues with the micro-architecture itself

The uarch choices on yonah crippled it. IMO these numbers look pretty damn good. In fact, these numbers put more weight behind the perf numbers I've been hearing on Merom, which are sometimes quite shocking (i.e. omg how did IDF do this)

 

[Furen]

How did the microarchitecture cripple it? The P6 microarchitecture IS the CPU, the other modern CPU architectures that Intel has been using are Netburst and the Itanium architecture (whatever the hell that's called), both of which are certainly not better for x86 code. You always have to make choices, if Intel had just sacrificed everything in pursuit of performance then you'd end up with either Netburst or Itanium all over again.

Now, the numbers that were thrown out at IDF claim that Merom's performance per watt will be about 50% better than Yonah, which is hardly believable without a die-shrink. Even with one that'd be somewhat unbelievable considering Intel is throwing everything but the kitchen sink onto this chip (x86-64 supposedly was not added to Yonah because it would raise the power consumption too much and then we're told that Merom will have this and much more and still give us an increment in performance per watt?).

 

[dmens]

Not the high level uarch, but low level implementation. Various decisions were made all over yonah to sacrifice performance. If merom made the right plays in terms of features that yield good ROI, the 50% gain is believable.

 

[clarkey01]

Originally posted by: dmens

I doubt Yonah will surpass AMD's performance with ANY edition of Yonah

True, but yonah is deliberately crippled.

Egh.....

 

[Furen]

Wow, I actually said "I doubt Yonah will surpass AMD's performance with ANY edition of Yonah", I meant that I doubt Intel will surpass AMD's performance with any Yonah cpu...

 

[linkgoron]

Well, I wonder what Dothan or Intelia would say after seeing these benchmarks.

Anyway, I thought Yonah would own, and maybe wake up AMD, but nope...

 

[R3MF]

give me a dual-core, dual-channel, DDR2 Turion64 CPU for my laptop anyday!

 

[Cooler]

They needed to do an OC test on it to see how much head room there is on 65nm I think it could hit close to 3 ghz. Otherwise it was very good.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Originally posted by: Furen
If you guys remember GamePC's very old Turion review

OMG don't pay any credence to that thing. It was written by a company trying to sell their own product!

Yonah is really kind of where I expected it. mArch improvements have yielded a slightly more efficient design (hence Yonah keeping pace with/exceeding Dothan @ +.13GHz clock), dual core performance is there but the full performance is traded off for power saving. For people who use laptops exclusively (kind of like me, except I do it only 'cuz I'm never at my desk), this will be nice to improve performance. But from what I'm hearing, the default power state is single core only on battery anyway. Yonah is a great step in the right direction, but until I can see dual cores yielding acceptable battery life I won't rejoice. Personally I'm waiting for merom

 

[RichUK]

I haven?t been following Intel that much.

But what are the known specs of Merom and Conroe, or what can we expect from these cores over Yonah?

I think the preliminary results are not bad at all as the focus of this CPU is on low power consumption and is aimed predominately at the laptop market, even though desktop boards will be released. Thats why i wonder what more can Conroe and Merom bring to the table if Yonah is just a taster, from what is known that is?

I think next year should be quite interesting, i love new significantly Improved/New technology. I am interested, but i dont see this as a table turner from Intel ATM.

Thanks