Conclusions
Sometimes we have to craft finely nuanced analyses of our CPU test results in order to summarize the various merits and weaknesses of different processors as fairly as possible. Not so today. Intel was already well ahead in the performance game with its 65nm quad-core processors, and the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 simply extends that lead by anywhere from a few percentage points to nearly 20%. What's more, it does so on the strength of a handful of key revisions to the chips, including a larger L2 cache and a fast divider, that benefit a startlingly broad range of applications, from games to office apps and scientific computing. In the video encoding application we tested that supports SSE4, we saw even larger performance gains. The Core microarchitecture has always had strong clock-for-clock performance, but Intel's design team has found ample room for improvement—and delivered it.

Yet the QX9650's advances in per-clock performance may not even be its best quality. Our power consumption testing confirmed Intel wasn't just blowing smoke when it claimed big reductions in switching power and leakage current for its 45nm fabrication process. Our QX9650 test system drew 34W less power at idle and 74W less under load than a comparably equipped Core 2 Extreme QX6850-based one. Taken together with the increases in clock-for-clock performance, the QX9650 brought a 33% reduction in the overall system power needed to render a scene. That's a huge step forward in power-efficient performance.

All of this comes without any increase in clock speed—yet. Intel seems to be holding higher speeds in reserve, since we were easily able to reach 3.66GHz with our QX9650, without having to resort to crazy-insane core voltages. We can probably expect to see both higher core clocks and higher bus speeds from this generation of products as it matures.

Let the prophets of doom-and-gloom stick that in their pipes and smoke it. They may be right about transistor scaling limits eventually—duh—but many of them spoke too much, too soon.

The crazy thing is that the QX9650 may not even be the fastest desktop microprocessor to arrive this year, if AMD somehow manages to hit the right clock speeds with its Phenom. Let's not kid ourselves. Based on everything we've seen from the 45nm Xeons and Barcelona Opterons, Intel appears positioned to hang on to the performance crown for the foreseeable future. But one never knows until the chips arrive, as the Phenom is set to do very soon. Stay tuned.