Quote Originally Posted by Bandwidth View Post
3.4GHz ES sample not bad

Kentsfield is on average about 10% faster than Phenom clock-for-clock. Yorkefield adds like 6% more performance to that, so around 16%. The new 45nm Deneb is supposed to be 15% faster than Phenom, so it should be a little faster than Kentsfield and about equal in performance to Yorkfield.

Power consumption will not match that of Intel 45nm CPUs, because Intel uses HighK-MG while AMD doesn't (yet). AMD expects power consumption to be 15% lower on Deneb, which is not that great but still helps.

Phenom is in many cases cache starved, 2MB of shared L3 cache is too small, and Deneb should do much better with 3x more L3 cache. Now I really hope AMD will be able to clock the NB higher than 2GHz with Deneb, as every 200MHz increase should give a 2-3% increase in performance. Doesn't seem like much, but when you have a Deneb running at 3.2GHz for both CPU and NB, the difference will be very noticeable

I don't think the nb/L3 clocking is really that important I've run them 1:1 on my phenom and its no faster than when its not. The higher the cpu speed gets the nb and l3 speed need to increase also but it seems like as long as you keep no larger than a 400mhz disparity in clock speed between the two then you aren't missing out on performance(doesn't totally work that way in memory benches. I'm speaking in respect to the Crysis benchmark and 3dmark). What we don't know is what if the three times larger L3 cache will have a larger effect from clocking it higher.