Intel Dual Processor Performance Revealed

The AnandTech article here represents about a week of human effort compressed into three days. The report is invaluable to PC aficianados who are interested in how Intel (and be implication AMD's) forthcoming dual core processors will perform in lab and real world benchmarks.

In a major break with history, Intel sent selected PC editors an evaluation kit for the not-yet -announced dual core Pentium D (3.2 GHz with no Hyperthreading) and Pentium Extreme Edition (3.2 GHz with HT). Thus, we all can digest what these products will do even though they are not yet launched.

Here's what Anand concludes after some three dozen tests:
- 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. - all users could benefit from its presence on their dual core platforms.

The ExtremeTech review is here. (Read the AnandTech review first)

Dual core processors such as the Pentium Extreme Edition tested in these benchmarks will force the software industry to rewrite code to take advantage of resources that in the past were only available on big-iron servers. The rewrite will take years, but will be worth it.

That makes the introduction of dual core processors for personal computing this spring not just another product launch but a landmark in the history of the information technology industry.

Bottom Line: intense computing users who do lots of multi-tasking will "feel" better performance in every day work with a dual-core processor, even though some individual tasks may take longer.

Peter S. Kastner