Conclusion

As we see, there are considerable performance differences between a Core 2 processor running on one, two or four cores. You’ll experience the least differences with popular games such as Quake IV, Prey or Call of Duty 2, as these haven’t been optimized much for multi-core processors. The newer the game title, the better your chances to benefit from dual or quad core processors. At this time, a dual core at high clock speeds is the best (and most reasonable) choice for gaming.

Professional applications such as the graphics rendering suite 3DStudio Max, Cinebench or Mainconcept’s H.264 encoder are the exact opposite - these require as much performance as they can get, and hence were already optimized to make maximum use of dual and quad core processors. All three scale almost linearly, and are close to doubling performance when doubling the core count.

Scaling of the SYSmark 2007 Preview results depends heavily on the benchmark run: the 3D and video creation segments clearly benefit more from a quad core processor than e-learning and productivity.

Audio and video transcoding benchmarks clearly benefit from a second core, but not yet from four cores. Finally, the synthetic benchmarks 3DMark06 and PCMark05 scale linearly, which doesn’t come as a surprise.

Overall, the current quad core processor generation does provide the performance reserves that Intel promised. However, there are still many applications that do not yet take much advantage of more than two cores. Our conclusion is thus simple: if you can get a quad core of similar clock speed for only a little premium over the dual core, go for it; if not, stick to a reasonably priced dual core.

Last but not least, the availability of AMD’s new Phenom X4 by the end of this year, as well as Intel’s Core 2 Duo E8000 and Core 2 Quad Q9000, will hopefully heat up competition in the almost boring CPU market.

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