Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (Quad Core) (page 9: Conclusion)

Conclusion

Two years ago, we all thought AMD had the best position in the dual core race. Last year, however, Intel was the fastest and released the Pentium Extreme Edition one month earlier than the Athlon 64 X2. Today, Intel succeeds in releasing a quad core a year in advance! AMD will soon release the 4x4 platform, but it will "only" feature two Opteron processors renamed the Athlon 64 FX that will fit into two distinct Sockets.

Of course, the solution chosen by Intel, two dies in the same packaging, is far from being the most elegant and we prefer by far the mono die solution that will be released by AMD in a year. In the meantime, Intel has a product on the market even if we have to keep in mind that this monster with 582 million transistors is quite expensive to produce and that the company will only succeed in making it widely available after the release of 45nm technology expected in 2008 (unless it has to answer to an aggressive price policy by AMD with the future K8L).

There is one question left…besides the technological demonstration, what is this processor really made for? If graphic and multimedia experts don’t look too hard and are pleased to have an alternative to Xeon stations for 4 cores, the majority of users will find this CPU almost pointless.

Indeed, even if you are using applications that require heavy processor resources, most software will only use two cores. Applications that require the most performance are still monothread (games) and “multithreaded” doesn´t necessarily mean capable of fully using four cores.

Intel released the quad-core one year in advance compared to its direct competitor, but we wonder today if it isn´t simply a year too early for desktops. Of course, it’s better to be early than late, but initially the Xeon line will benefit the most from this improvement whether in terms of density level or license prices, as the Socket license is more and more generalised.