We analyze the performance of a 2.9GHz 65nm Core 2 Duo (aka Conroe) vs. a 2.8GHz 90nm K8, using performance tools from Intel and AMD. With VTune and Code Analyst we are able to extract performance counter information such as IPC, uop density, cache miss rates, branch mispredictions, memory accesses and other data that we use to explain the difference in performance between the two CPUs.
The first part focuses on characteristics which are common across both CPUs, while later parts will focus on microarchitecture specific counters.
