I don?t care much about Yonah other than it being a preview for future Intel products, since it is a purpose built notebook processor, which has been on the most part engineered to supply next gen performance with a lower power requirement. I never expected to see ground breaking performance from this processor as it is constrained for use in a laptop.
However I am interested in Intel?s new soon to be desktop processors, Merom and Conroe. I think this article is good, because as has already been stated in the article it gives you an insight to what direction Conroe will be headed with regards to possible performance. I am still a little disappointed that clock for clock it doesn?t perform much better if at all then the X2, and the fact Conroe is slated to have more pipes (4 more I believe) seems to add further to the disappointment. Yes it will improve the headroom for higher clocks, but I would have thought this time, Intel would have had emphasis on engineering a chip similar to the performance of the Dothan, with respect to lower latency L2 cache, and fewer amount of pipes (which was still able to clock high albeit a single core). Although the number of pipe line stages is debateable, if Intel can squeeze a lot more top end frequency from the design, and if it indeed proves more beneficial for overall performance, then this would be a plus.
I also assume that with 4MB?s total L2 cache on the Conroe (against 2MB total on Yonah), would have yet a further L2 cache latency penalty, would it not?