QX 9650

Intel’s new QX9650 looks identical to all of the other Core2 processors. On the top it has the standard silver heat spreader and retail models will feature the normal branding. On the underside it is a little different to previous models with a minor rearrangement of components.

CPUz informs us that this processor uses a Yorkfield core. The new Yorkfield CPU’s are built using a 45nm process and have 820 million transistors on a die of 214mm2. (2x 410m/107mm2 compared to 341m/143mm2 on Conroe). The use of 45nm allows for a much lower core voltage, 1.25v during normal use with a maximum TDP of 130w.  The change to 45nm also results in a 30% reduction in switching power as well as just over 20% in switching speed. The changes do not stop there and this processor adds two major specifications. The first is the ability to use SSE 4, which includes instructions specific to high definition video, and the second is an increase of Level 2 cache from eight megabytes as featured on previous Quad Core chips to twelve megabytes.

Finally the QX9650 runs at 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz front side bus and 9x multiplier which makes it identical in terms of speed to the QX6850. Identical in speed but not necessarily performance as we will see later on in the review.