Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter

semi-Final Words

The verdict on dual core is far from in, but what we've presented here is a start.  We have more coverage coming, including power consumption, overclocking potential and a look at the more economical dual core price points from Intel.  We're also hard at work on creating new multitasking benchmarks with the hopes of eventually reaching the holy grail of being able to measure and quantify system response time accurately.  To that effect, if you all have any suggestions for usage models that you'd like to see tested or any benchmarking suggestions in general, please let us know.

We're far from being able to make any conclusions about dual core or Intel's Pentium D/Extreme Edition, but there are some things that we can say at this point:

- In general use of the system, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 felt just as fast as the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.  In multitasking, there was no substitute for the dual core Pentium Extreme Edition.

- Hyper Threading made a decent impact on our usage, even on the dual core platform.  However, the benchmarks show that Hyper Threading on dual core doesn't always result in a performance boost.  That being said, we'd still opt for Hyper Threading as it just seems to make things smoother than without on the dual core chip.  Although Intel has a desire to separate their Extreme Edition and Pentium D lines, we think that Hyper Threading is the wrong feature to use as a differentiator - all users could benefit from its presence on their dual core platforms. 

- Intel's pricing strategy for dual core makes a lot of sense to force market adoption.  In the near future, we will be looking at Intel's cheapest dual core offering to see how well it stacks up to AMD's similarly priced single core chips.  The only way to make sure that developers crank out multithreaded desktop software is to ensure a large installed user base, and Intel appears to be committed to doing that.

- AMD should get an even larger boost from the move to dual core than Intel has, simply because AMD doesn't presently have the ability to execute more than one thread at a time.  Intel's Hyper Threading on their single core chips does improve response time greatly as well as improves multitasking performance.  For AMD, the move to dual core will give their users the benefits in response time that their Intel counterparts have enjoyed with Hyper Threading as well as the extra advantage offered by having two identical cores on a chip. 

- When it comes to dual core vs. single core with Hyper Threading, there's a huge difference.  While both improve system response time, dual core improves it more while also guaranteeing better overall system performance.  Hyper Threading lets you multitask, dual core lets you actually get work done while multitasking.

That's all for now - we'll have much more dual core coverage later on this week and the next.