Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Revisiting The Dual-Core vs. Quad-Core Debate Email This Print This View My Personal Library Heavy Gear March 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 3 Page(s) 50 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Revisiting The Dual-Core vs. Quad-Core Debate Anand's Corner by Anand Lal Shimpi Anand Lal Shimpi has turned a fledgling personal page on GeoCities.com into one of the world’s most visited and trusted PC hardware sites. Anand started his site in 1997 at just 14 years old and has since been featured in USA Today, CBS’ “48 Hours,” and Fortune. His site—www.anandtech.com—receives more than 55 million page views and is read by more than 2 million readers per month. Perspective is one of our most important allies. While we love to talk about the move to quad-core, most of that is simply because it’s actually affordable. Intel started with the Core 2 Quad Q6600, bringing four cores down to less than $300. But these days, AMD will sell you four cores for around $150, and Intel will do it for $180. Here’s where perspective matters, however: Less than 5% of Intel’s desktop CPU shipments are quad-core processors; the rest are all dual- and single-core. So perhaps it’s time to revisit the dual vs. quad debate and figure out what makes sense. I’ll start by making the argument for dual-core. There is almost never a situation where I’d recommend going with a higher-clocked single-core CPU over a lower-clocked dual-core processor. To illustrate my point, I need go no further than the Athlon LE-1640; this is a 2.7GHz K8-based design from AMD but only features a single core. The lowest-clocked dual-core K8 design is the Athlon X2 4050e, running at 2.1GHz. In nearly all applications where CPU performance matters, the dual-core X2 is faster than the LE-1640 (this includes 3D games, as pretty much all games these days use at least two threads). Video encoding, image editing, gaming, multitasking, and file compression can all make use of two cores. The single-core processors currently on the market are the Athlon LE and Sempron LE from AMD and the Celeron 4xx series from Intel. The only reason to opt for any of them is price, but while the single-core chips are available for as little as $36, you might as well spend $50 and go dual-core. But, of course, the topic at hand is comparing chips with four cores to those with two. The quad-core market is still incredibly small, and the frequency gap between dual- and quad-core CPUs at the same price point has grown tremendously. At around $185, you can purchase a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 or a 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500, a 32% increase in clock speed, or 766MHz, but with half the cores. If you encode a lot of video, the conventional wisdom says that the benefits of quad-core will be more than enough to make up for the clock speed differential, and, for the most part, that’s true in the Q6600 vs. E8500 comparison. The lighter encode tests will actually show the Q6600 and E8500 as equals, but if you’re doing Blu-ray backups using x264, then the quad-core is faster, despite its lower clock speed. If you’re just making DivX rips of your DVDs, the two won’t be all that different. As you might expect, 3D rendering is the greatest ally of quad-core chips in this comparison; the E8500 just can’t hold a candle to the Q6600 in applications like 3ds Max. When the CPU is involved in 3D rendering, having more cores trumps higher clock speeds. So, what about general, everyday use? For most folks, dual-core will be the way to go here. Even running many applications at the same time, four cores are still difficult to tax unless you have one application that’s very thread-heavy (read: 3D rendering). For overall snappiness, you’ll have a better time today on a faster dual-core CPU. Gamers will also appreciate the higher clock speed of a faster dual-core CPU. In nearly all games, the E8500 will stomp the Q6600, although I should point out that “nearly all games” doesn’t include Far Cry 2. FC2 is one of the first games I’ve seen to really benefit from more than two cores, and here the E8500 actually comes in a little slower than the Q6600. If you’re buying for the long-term, quad-core may make more sense for gamers, but if you’re buying for the next 12 months or so, dual-core is the better gaming bet. Obviously, if you can afford to get a higher-clocked quad-core CPU, that’s going to be your best bet; otherwise don’t underestimate your dual-core options: In many cases, they may be your best bet. 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