Last week Intel introduced its highly anticipated Lynnfield processors under the Core i5 and Core i7 brands. Three chips emerged:

We tested exclusively with the Core i7 870 and the Core i5 750, the 860 didn't arrive in my lab until after the review went live. I was spending the greater part of a week with AMD at that time and didn't get to testing until this past weekend. Here's the chip:

What makes the Core i7 860 so interesting is that it's priced on par with everybody's favorite Nehalem: the Core i7 920. The 870 has great turbo modes, but it's nearly twice the price of the 860. The Core i5 750 wins in the price department, but it lacks Hyper Threading - part of what makes Nehalem so tasty in the first place. The 860 effectively gives us the best of both worlds, hence the focus on it for today's review.

I had a few mistakes in my original version of this table, but below you can see the turbo modes offered by the 860. They're not quite as nice as the 870, but the chip is also half as expensive. You'll also see that like the 750 you only get a single bin improvement with 3 or 4 cores active, but like the 870 you get 4 and 5 extra speed bins in the dual and single active core situations:

I've explained turbo mode in great detail here. In short, Lynnfield's PCU (Power Control Unit) looks at the number of cores active, shuts down those that are inactive, and uses the thermal savings to boost the clock speed of the active cores - all within the operating specs of the processor. Unless you're overclocking, turbo will never compromise system stability in search of greater performance.

	Single Core	Dual Core	Quad Core	Hex Core
TDP

It works very well in practice, particularly with Windows 7. A question that's come up since the initial review is what happens when background tasks kick in. As I mentioned in the "Speed Limits" section of the Lynnfield review, this is something that can prevent turbo from kicking in:

"There's also the issue of background threads running in the OS. Although your foreground app may only use a single thread, there are usually dozens (if not hundreds) of active threads on your system at any time. Just a few of those being scheduled on sleeping cores will wake them up and limit your max turbo frequency (Windows 7 is allegedly better at not doing this)."

One of the features of Windows 7 is that the OS supposedly does a better job of grouping tasks together on a single core to avoid waking up an adjacent core and negating the gains from turbo mode. I'm still working on finding a good way to measure this but from what I've seen initially, Windows 7 tends to do a good job of grouping threads onto one or two cores - meaning we tend to see the 4-bin or 5-bin turbo modes. The other thing to keep in mind is that the processor can turbo up/down faster than the OS can schedule threads, the benefits of turbo are present even while in the middle of executing a task. Remember what dictates turbo is both thermal dissipation and current consumption; the mix of instructions executed varies depending on the task and even during the task, which in turn varies the frequency your core(s) will run at.

The end result is a system that seems to feel more responsive as well as perform better. Of course none of this matters if you're going to be disabling turbo and just overclocking, but I've addressed that scenario in a separate article today :)

And I don't really have a reason for showing this, but I like tables so here's the current quad-core processor landscape:

The Test

SYSMark 2007 Performance

Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.

The Core i7 860, as expected, falls right in between the i5 750 and the i7 870. The overall performance impact of slightly faster clock speeds and Hyper Threading is small, it's only in the individual cases that you see large gains from the feature. Most applications have difficulty stressing four cores, pushing eight threads isn't any easier.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.

Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.

While the Core i5 750 couldn't beat the i7 920, the 860 can. Thanks to Hyper Threading and a higher base clock speed, Lynnfield proves to be an able performer.

DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3

Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:

Lynnfield inches towards the crown with the 860; it's closer to the 870 than the Core i5 750, and that's to be expected. The biggest gains here are due to Hyper Threading, the clock speed is just icing on the cake.

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance

Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source implementation of H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

The Core i7 860 continues to do better than the i7 920, even if by only a small margin. As expected, it's closer to the 870 than it is to the i5 750 thanks to Hyper Threading.

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile

In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.

The race is close here, there's only a 2 second difference between the Core i7 870 and the Core i5 750. The 860 lands closer to the 750 this time.

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:

There are definitely cases where Bloomfield's memory controller is a boon, the Core i7 860 is able to approach but not outperform the i7 920.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Since threaded performance is excellent on the 860, after all it's running at 3.46GHz in this situation. The 920 doesn't stand a chance.

Up the thread count and we see the Core i7 860 slightly ahead of the 920.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

Blender performance is again faster than a 920 and nearly on par with the Core i7 870.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

POV-Ray performance is nearly on par with the Core i7 870 and equal to that of the i7 920.

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 actually puts both the 860 and 870 slightly ahead of the Core i7 975. It's clear that anything faster than a Core i5 750 in this case basically performs about the same. It looks like we're starting to be bottlenecked by our SSD.

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.

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.

Again the Core i7 860 pulls slightly ahead of the 920 and falls short of the 870, right where we'd expect it to land.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

The 860 and the 920 keep trading positions, but as you'd expect given the similar price points - the two perform about the same.

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:

Fallout 3 Game Performance

Bethesda’s latest game uses an updated version of the Gamebryo engine (Oblivion). This benchmark takes place immediately outside Vault 101. The character walks away from the vault through the Springvale ruins. The benchmark is measured manually using FRAPS.

Gamers would be hard pressed to notice a difference between the Core i5 750 and the 860, and definitely not between the 860 and 870. The two are nearly equals here.

Left 4 Dead

Zombies? Check. Zombie killing performance:

FarCry 2 Multithreaded Game Performance

FarCry 2 ships with the most impressive benchmark tool we’ve ever seen in a PC game. Part of this is due to the fact that Ubisoft actually tapped a number of hardware sites (AnandTech included) from around the world to aid in the planning for the benchmark.

For our purposes we ran the CPU benchmark included in the latest patch:

Crysis Warhead

Power Consumption

The Core i7 860's power consumption at idle is nice and low, as expected thanks to power gating and low TDP of Lynnfield.

Overclocking

Gary actually handled the overclocking of the 860 before it got into my hands, thankfully this sample seemed to fare better than our first i7 860.

First, our stock voltage overclock with the retail cooler, 3.33GHz:

Four cores under load, turbo enabled, stock voltage, retail cooler

Next, max overclock with turbo enabled again using the retail cooler, 3.53GHz (four cores active):

Max overclock, four cores under load, turbo enabled, retail cooler

And finally the max overclock with no turbo. Once more, using the retail cooler:

Max overclock, single core load, no turbo

The rule of thumb with Lynnfield appears to be 3 - 3.3GHz overclocks at stock voltage, 3.8GHz+ is possible with additional voltage.

Final Words

Perhaps this is a bit anticlimactic, but the Core i7 860 performs exactly where you'd expect it to. It's faster than a Core i5 750, faster than a Core i7 920 and slower than a Core i7 870. As I noted in The Lynnfield Follow Up, overclocking is much easier on Bloomfield (LGA-1366) thanks to the absence of an on-die PCIe controller. It's not impossible on Lynnfield, it's just effortless on Bloomfield.

My recommendations from the initial Lynnfield review still stand, you'll want to opt for Bloomfield processor if you care about:

1) High-end multi-GPU performance (or other uses of high bandwidth PCIe)
2) Stock Voltage Overclocking
3) Future support for 6-core Gulftown CPUs

In terms of cost effectiveness however - the Core i7 860 is the way to go. With cheaper motherboards and higher operating frequencies than a Core i7 920, for the majority of users the 860 will be the better pick. Here's where the discussion gets interesting however.

A year ago, $284 for a Core i7 920 didn't seem like a lot for what you were getting. But with AMD shipping $99 quad core CPUs, and the Phenom II line being very competitive in the $130 - $200 space - is Lynnfield too expensive?

Our sources are telling us that Lynnfield isn't selling as well as expected, it's not a flop, but definitely selling under expectations. The reason? Price. Apparently the vendors (and their customers) were hoping for a sub-$200 Core i5 750. Remember that the majority of quad-core sales happen under the $200 mark. Fortunately for AMD, there aren't any cheaper quad-core Lynnfields on the roadmaps for Intel through Q3 of next year; the Core i5 750 will be the cheapest quad-core Nehalem for the foreseeable future.

Instead, Intel will compete with 32nm Clarkdale CPUs in the sub-$200 space. These are dual core parts with Hyper Threading; it remains to be seen how well they'll stack up to AMD's quad-core CPUs in that space, since it doesn't look like we'll see Lynnfield down there anytime soon.

Assuming that Clarkdale isn't overly competitive, Phenom II could dominate the ~$150 quad-core price point throughout much of 2010. The biggest threat to Phenom II appears to be the Core i5 650. We'll see how that plays out early next year.