Anand has managed to get his hands on Intel's flagship Conroe processor, the 2.93 GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800. The chip was tested in a hotel room in Taiwan, from where a few trips to hardware manufacturers' offices yielded a compatible motherboard based on Intel's latest P965 Express chipset. Outside the confines of Intel's labs, the Core 2 Extreme was compared to a similar machine powered by one of AMD's latest 2.8 GHz Athlon 64 FX-62 processors for Socket AM2.
Interestingly, the results paint a picture similar to those from our Intel-monitored Core 2 tests: the Core 2 Extreme one-ups the Athlon 64 FX fairly significantly throughout game tests and in SYSMark 2004. Also interesting is the Core 2's memory latency, which is just 2.66 nanoseconds higher than the Athlon's despite the fact that Conroe lacks an integrated memory controller. Memory bandwidth tests do give a clear advantage to the Athlon 64 FX, however, even though both chips were tested using DDR2-800 memory. It's still a little early to jump to conclusions, but it's looking more and more like AMD will lose the performance crown once Conroe ships this summer.
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