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Penryn improvements explored

I wanted to see exactly how much difference the architectural improvements and larger L2 cache would make for Penryn, so I compiled my results in a nice, easy table below.  I took the Xeon X3210 and compared its performance in every benchmark I ran against the Yorkfield QX9650 with both processors running at the same clockspeeds with the exact same memory and motherboard configurations.  When reading the below table please be aware that for some tests the lower score is better, so you will see "negative" % improvements.  I highlighted the tests where Yorkfield/Penryn lost to its predecessor in red so you can differentiate when the %improvement should be read as "Yorkfield lost".

I think the above table shows a pretty astonishing trend.  Penryn is FASTER in 23 out of 26 tests against its predecessor, in the same motherboard, with the same memory, with the same settings.  In 8 of the tests Yorkfield bested by 8% or more (sometimes up to 16% improvement).  Those Penryn architectural changes we described are certainly doing something!

Now that we've seen how Penryn does in stock performance, let's start looking at my favourite part of any CPU review: the extreme overclocking analysis :-).