Are we there yet? q6600 vs i3-3220

[wh3resmycar]

hey folks!

it's been almost half a decade since the 1st quads (double cheeseburger or not) came out. now i'm thinking of buying a new rig as of late. now the question is with general performance, has hyperthreading reached a point where a hyperthreaded dualcore can match a 1st gen quad ?

areas of concern:

1. cpu bound gaming (the console ports most of the time)
2. android-sdk compile time
3. video encoding
4. multi-gpu setup
5. windows 8 performance
6. will put a 660(non-ti)/7850 or lower.

* would've put power consumption but obviously the 22nm chip will win.

p.s: after watching a vice documentary on youtube about how messed up the environment is i've decided to put the old rig away and switching between a smartphone, atom d2500 (sucks big time), and an xbox360 (what i'm using right now to make this post since the new update made ie available) to do my usual net/game stuffs. now i'm trying to consolidate gaming and net browsing once more.

 

[jaguarskx]

In general, HT does make make up for having actual physical cores. The efficiency of HT depends on how well it has been implemented in the program's design. As for games... games do not use HT (I suppose BF3 is an exception) and the vast majority of games still only use 2 cores.

As for how well a modern dual core Intel CPU can compare to an older quad core? In general, each core's performance has increased mostly thanks to increased IPC (Instructions Per Clock) rather than clockspeed. I did a very simple test sometime during the summer.

Over the summer I decided to re-encode a documentary to a lower resolution so that it can be played back on my Cowon S9 portable media player. The original resolution was something like 1280x720 and I reduced it to about 720x400. I used VirtualDub and the XviD codec in the two pass method. I think it set the bitrate to 1100kbps. I performed the encoding on my desktop which has a quad core Q9450 OC'ed to 3.0GHz, and my laptop with a dual core Sandy Bridge Core i5-2410m which maxes out at 2.9GHz when Turbo Boost is enabled.

My Q9450 was able to complete the re-encode in about 54 minutes. My laptop with the i5-2410m was able to complete it in about 38 or 39 minutes.