First Clarkdale benchmarks surfaceA glimpse of things to comeBy Paul TaylorThursday, 16 April 2009, 07:44FOLLOWING NEWS that Intel has retired Havendale even before it launched, having replaced it with Clarkdale, some pics and benchmarks of the upcoming Intel Clarkdale processor have been posted to the Xtremesystems' forum, courtesy of JCornell.Clarkdale is the desktop counterpart to Arrandale, combining a 32nm CPU with a 45nm GPU on separate dies but in the same package. The processor is a dual-core hyper-threaded unit built on the Westmere Nehalem-shrink, features Turbo Boost tech and 4MB of 'smart cache' (L3 in fact, and in addition to 256KB per CPU core). The memory controller is now also integrated into the package, providing dual DDR3-1333 channels.The multi-chip die package will also cut out one entire chip (or rather, integrate it) and plug into the Ibex Peak chipset (P55 and P57 mobos). The lack of the usual northbridge controller hub complements the die shrink that leads us to Intel's claim of a 65W part.At Xtremesystems, the early bird upped some pics of the Clarkdale processor with CPU-Z, GPU-Z and Core Temp caps of a 2.4GHz (133MHz x 18) clock with Intel Havendale graphics taking up 32MB of RAM. Unfortunately, that's just about all the info the utilities gathered from the processor, as these are yet to be updated.If the slideware we've seen is any measure of the 45nm IGP on the Clarkdale package, it will be substantially larger than the current crop of G4x series IGPs but a not so distant cousin.As it stands now, Clarkdale looks to be at least 10 per cent faster than an equally-clocked 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo P8600, even though SuperPI is traditionally averse to HyperThreading. 18.125 seconds crunching 1M PI is nothing to be ashamed of.Unfortunately, you'll have to stay tuned for 3D performance as the benchmarking is only at the beginning... µ
