Tuesday, June 10, 2008
To Quad or Not to Quad, That is The Question
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 07:00 AM
When both Intel and AMD began the move to multiple cores a couple of years ago, it began a shift in the industry away from focusing on maximum megahertz and toward the idea spreading out the work over multiple processing cores. While Intel and AMD have poured significant resources into coming up with better and better multi-core designs, for the most part the the software industry hasn't been able to keep up. Time after time, I'll see a program stuck at using one core, which is frustrating because I know if that program was using the second core it would complete its task much faster. When I built my monster media machine last year, I used the most powerful CPU Intel had at the time: the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800. This dual-core beast of a CPU runs at 2.93 Ghz and has 4 MB of L2 cache. It chewed through everything I threw at it. Technology never stops marching, however, so only a few months after publishing that article, Intel's quad-core CPUs were taking centre stage.
A few months ago I thought it would be interesting to answer the question many geeks are probably asking themselves: is it worth it to move from a dual-core CPU to a quad-core CPU? Many of the motherboards from 2007 are compatible with the Intel quad-core CPUs, but when does it make sense to replace your Intel dual-core CPU with a quad-core CPU? This article aims to answer that question. I requested an Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 from Intel Canada to compare an Extreme CPU to an Extreme CPU, but they didn't have one for me to test, so I was sent an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 instead. The Q6600 is just over 500 mhz slower than the X6800 I was using, but it has two more cores and double the L2 cache. How would it measure up? Let's dig in. Read more...
