Wolfdale versus Core 2 Duo

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 19th April 2007

Those sneaky Wolfs will come and take your monies, for you will want to upgrade!

Although it's a hectic life being an IDF hack, shooting from keynote to workshop to face-to-face, I managed to find ten minutes (literally) to catch up with the extremely helpful Intel Digital Home Engineer, Jeremy Saldate, who kindly showed off a demo of Core 2 Duo versus Wolfdale.

All this talk of quad-core Penryn at 45nm and it's easy to forget its dual-core companion, Wolfdale. It is made using the same 45nm process with the associated optimisations, but only has a 6MB cache (rather than 12MB) and a single dual-core die (rather than the twin dual-core die to create quad-core).

It also has a lower thermal envelope which should allow for much better overclockability compared to Penryn.

Jeremy showed off a real world automated run of the latest Adobe Première Pro optimised for SSE4. Obviously, this gives the Wolfdale a distinct advantage, having the software capable of utilising the new instructions. This is also a carefully selected situation but it's still impressive nonetheless.

The program rendered the video at 14.44 fps on the new Wolfdale dual core CPU, but could only manage 9.77 fps on the current generation Core 2 Duo.

Are you reaching for your wallet already? Or do you feel the need to wait until bit-tech gets a-hold of one to really see if it's worth your cash? Let us know in the forums.