Date:
Sunday , January 03, 2010
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Westmere 32nm & Clarkdale Core i5-661 Review

Intel fuses its new 32nm Westmere processor along with its 45nm GPU onto one package. This is Intel's new Clarkdale CPU that will be officially known as Intel Core i5-6XX and Intel Core i3-5XX series processors. Today we look at the Core i5-661 which we compare to the Core i5-750, Core i7-965, and AMD Phenom II X4.

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GPU Offload

We see more and more applications offloaded to the GPU now days. Odd though, at the same time we have been seeing our desktop processors add more and more cores. Intel’s own 6-core 12-thread Gulftown processor is not far away. So while we watch the GPU/CPU battles rage as these products both fight it out for application space, I know many of you that own upper end Core i7 and AMD Phenom II boxes wonder what all the hubbub is for. A lot of it just makes no sense since we now have all these CPU threads to utilize.

However, like we pointed out earlier, the Clarkdale is not an "enthusiast" CPU, at least what the multi-billion dollar Intel calls "enthusia$t". (We enthusiasts know that mainstream and low end parts have always been the biggest enthusiast parts out there! And yes we will get to that.)

Clarkdale processors will make it into a lot of consumer computers for sure. And certainly many of those computers are being used to watch all sorts of video. The Holy Grail in terms of video that we often see is can the computer pull off full 1080P Blu-ray decode.

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We tested Intel’s Core i5-661 along with the DH55TC motherboard.

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If 1080P Blu-ray is the watermark that Intel was looking to reach, it has done so just fine. With our 1920x1200 Dell U2410 attached to the DVI-D output, we could easily watch our Blu-ray disc while our CPU damn near idled. The full Blu-ray decode was being offloaded to our Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD.

Now this might or might not seem like a big feat, but considering you can buy the lowly Core i3-530 for about $115 street (our guess) and have two free computing cores at 2.93GHz while you are decoding Blu-ray is a big deal.

You will have to have software especially coded to take advantage of this. Intel supplied us with special version of WinDVD and PowerDVD that did just this. Both worked almost perfectly along with our Core i5-661 processor and Intel DH55TC motherboard pictured above.

What will be interesting is seeing what kind of applications are to come in the future that will be able to leverage the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD.

Keep in mind that this processor is HyperThreaded as well which makes things work very smooth on the desktop. We have long loved HyperThreading and found it to very much lend a positive impact to our desktop experience especially when we had fewer cores. HyperThreading on the Core i5-661 is very much at home.