By moving to 45nm, Intel was able to push clock speeds past 3 GHz without boosting the amount of power the chip consumes. Penryn also runs on a 1333-MHz bus, compared to the 1066-MHz bus that current Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme chips use. So even in games like Half-Life 2 that don't take advantage of quad-core, the chip posts some significant gains.
When heavy graphics processing kicks in, as in the overall 3DMark test, the system relies much more heavily on its graphics board, erasing much of the difference between the CPU families. Take the GPU out of the equation, as in the 3DMark CPU score, and the dramatic results return. Since the CPU test takes advantage of more that two cores, both quad-core chips outperform the dual-core Penryn.
And quad-core continues to reign as we move to video encoding. While more cores carry the day in Cinebench and Mainconcept, Intel's Divx test showed some particularly interesting results. The alpha version of the Divx encoder used in the test makes use of the SSE4 instructions built into Penryn--in particular, a shuffle instruction that allows the CPU to more efficiently reorder data for processing. So while more CPU cores still help with Divx encoding, the SSE4 support in this alpha encoder allowed even the dual-core Penryn to outpace its current quad-core competition.
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