Intel unveiled the first benchmark numbers of its recently announced Penryn quad-core processor, which runs at 3.33GHz, at the IDF event in Beijing, China. Intel presented the benchmark numbers of a Penryn 45nm quad-core processor running at 3.33 Gigahertz (GHz) with a 1333 Megahertz (MHz) front side bus (FSB) and 12MB cache versus an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 introduced last week at 2.93 GHz with 1066 FSB and 8MB cache. Another dual-core version of the Penryn family with 6MB L2 cache was also included in the comparison.

Intel said that the three test systems were configured with identical hardware, including a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory with 5-5-5-15 timings, and a 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. The results are available below.

	Penryn dual-core 3.33GHz	Penryn quad-core 3.33GHz	Core 2 Extreme QX6800 2.93GHz
3DMark06 - CPU (score)	3061	4957	4070
3DMark06 - Overall (score)	11015	11963	11123
Mainconcept H.264 encoder (sec)	119	73	89
Cinebench R9.5 - CPU benchmark	1134	1935	1549
Cinebench R10 Beta - CPU benchmark	7045	13068	10416
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (FPS)	210	210	153
Divx 6.6 Alpha with Virtualdub 1.7.1 (sec)	22	18	38

The quad-core Penryn's performance advantage over the current QX6800 ranges from just over 7% in 3DMark06's overall score to a stunning 53% in the Divx encoding test. The Half-Life 2 results do seem a little odd, though, if only because both dual- and quad-core Penryn chips are a whopping 37% faster than the QX6800.

We expect to confirn those results as soon as we have the Penryn processors in our hands.