The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Our Par2 test gets a nice boost from more cores, making the i5 661 overpriced in this case. The i3s however do very well, outperforming the Athlon II X4 630 and the triple-core Athlon II 435.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
The lighter the desktop workload (as in the fewer stressful threads you have running) the better Clarkdale does. The Core i3s are particularly sensible here. It's basically Intel's answer to the Athlon II X4 600 series.
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
Intel believes that one of the biggest cases for Clarkdale in the business market is Excel performance. The Core i5 661 continues to be overpriced for what it is, but the i3 540 and 530 look very good here. They're can outperform the Athlon II X4 630 and draw less power. Nice.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
The i3s come pretty close to doing well in our Blu-ray creation test, but once again the i5 661 falls short thanks to its ridiculous price. The i3s are a reasonable alternative to the Athlon II X4 630.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
Clarkdale isn't a good choice for this test, with the 661 matching the Athlon II X4 630. The i3 parts place below AMD quad-cores but above the tri-core offerings.
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Marcin - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
2D loadAnand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The Radeon HD 5870 is quite power efficient if it's not running a 3D app. Our load tests were done using our x264 encoding benchmark to stress the CPU. That's why I used the 5870 as a companion in those benchmarks - makes overall system power consumption lower so we can better see differences between CPUs. Good job AMD :)Take care,
Anand
yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Intel gives us this crap instead of 32nm P55.DrMrLordX - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Can we see results on an i3 530 instead? Some people with ES chips are reporting that i3s are not good for much of anything over 4 ghz. Also, the vcore on your 4.8 ghz is pretty high, even with water cooling. I would not want to run an i3 at that vcore on a daily basis.The phase results are really interesting, but I have to wonder how well this chip scales given the memory speed limitations you run into at higher BCLK.
Spoelie - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
First CPU-Z screenshot on the overclocking page shows CPU @ 1.3GHz, I don't think this is the correct shot?Rajinder Gill - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Speedstep and Turbo enbaled. The full load speed is 26X149 BCLK, so around 3874MHz..Spoelie - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
True, comment on gaming benchmarks:" the Core i3s are good gaming chips - especially when you consider how far you can overclock them. "
But how would you know, not having any in-house?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I've heard some very good initial results but I will be able to confirm when I get back from CES :)Take care,
Anand
marc1000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Suddenly it all makes sense. Intel would never enable 1080p decoding on Atom D510 not because of technical issues, but simply because it would kill the market for i3 even before it was released. The HTPC market does not need the i3 brute-power, but this is the only platform that will have HDMI and 1080p. If Atom D510 could do 1080p and had HDMI output then the choice for a HTPC would be a no-brainer. And excuse me, but I already have a gaming rig, so all I want right now is a HTPC to play PC content on my TV. And I won't buy a core i3 to do that, but I would buy a decent Atom board if it had the required HDMI and 1080p... so, for me, no HTPC for now...Kjella - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
That is why the old Atom + ION exists, excellent setup with 1080p acceleration and HDMI out. If you don't want it, wait until AMD or VIA/nVidia manages to work something out.