ritesh_laud :
Bottom line: If you use quad-optimized programs quite a bit, get the Q6600. If all you do is game and browse the web, get the Wolfdale as for those programs it's faster per clock, overclocks higher, uses less power, comes with SSE4, and on top of all that it's cheaper. It's really a no-brainer. Few games will be significantly quad-core optimized for at least another year or two, so when they are just drop in a quad which will be down to $150 or less by then.
Ok, regarding this whole dual-core vs. quad core discussion.
Have I missed something or..
Everytime there is talk about the usefullness of a quad-core processor, people always talk about multi-core optimized applications.
Same thing can be seen in all the benchmarks, from for example tomshardware.. (With focus on how fast you can render a scene, or encode some mp3)
What about multi-core optimized operating systems?
I really don't care about running one single application really fast. I'm interested in running several application without them interfering with each other. Yes i'm talking about multi-tasking. And each application can very well be single threaded. But I want them to be distributed on the avalable cores, and run simultainiously.
So if i'm running a file download, watching a video, and browsing in a lot of tabs. (and having anti-virus, and other stuff in the background) How well does this perform?
I guess a lot of this is up to the operating system, as much as the CPU..
So does anyone know of any test that has focused on this aspect of utilizing a serveral core CPU?
Perhaps comparing dual-core with quad-core, on both XP and Vista.
Thanks in advance