Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700: The Multi-core Era Begins

Final Words

Before we can really start to embrace greater than dual-core CPUs we'll need to have heavily threaded software, and thankfully it's looking like that software is well in development. Windows Vista and applications that ship for the new OS will be some of the first developed for a largely multi-core user base, not to mention that there are many game titles under development with support for multi-core. These days you almost have to try to avoid a dual core CPU when building or buying a new system, and it wasn't much more than a year ago that we were debating the merits of single vs. dual core. The debate begins anew with the release of Intel's Kentsfield core, although now we're talking about two vs. four cores.

The problem with gaming benchmarks is that they often lag behind the hardware. All of the games we're testing today are at least a few months old, and while it would be nice to have more titles that can take advantage of at least dual core processors, the challenges involved in building a game engine that can truly take advantage of multiple processor cores are difficult to overcome and require a lot of time. We are aware of at least three companies that are working on engines that will benefit from CPUs with more than two cores, however, and hopefully more companies will follow suit in the future. The "dual core revolution" is not yet two years old, and the majority of modern games require more than two years to design and develop. There has been a great focus on improving game graphics over the previous decade or more, but it looks like we may finally be reaching the point where other aspects of gameplay are becoming important, and in order to flesh out those other areas (physics, artificial intelligence, particle systems, number of entities, etc.) multiple processor cores have a lot of potential.

If you're the type of person that likes to participate in projects like Folding@Home, or if you do a lot of video rendering, 3D rendering, or some other task that can be easily parallelized, you might already be running a dual socket configuration with dual core processors. Quad core takes the benefits of such an offering and packages it into a single socket, and in the near future dual sockets will be able to move up to eight cores. The gaming results clearly didn't show any advantage to multi-core processors right now, beyond the moderate speed up a couple games gained with dual cores. However, there are plenty of gaming companies that are working on re-architecting their software in order to take advantage of not just two or four cores, but potentially any number of cores. Will they succeed? We have an upcoming article that will look at one company's work in the very near future, but suffice it to say there's definitely a lot of potential in multi-core platforms.

If you're stuck between choosing a Core 2 Extreme X6800 or QX6700 at $999, we'd obviously opt for the latter. Both give you incredible performance, but one is a bit more future-proof. And, as we said earlier, you can always overclock the QX6700 but you can't add more cores to the X6800. The best CPU buys are still going to be the E6300, E6400 and E6600, which are unfortunately "only" dual core solutions. Despite being only dual core offerings, all three are still some of the fastest performing desktop CPUs money can buy today.

With only a single $999 part, and even taking into account January's $851 Core 2 Quad offering, quad core is not going to be mainstream anytime soon nor are most applications ready for it. It's also worth mentioning that there's no point in waiting to upgrade to the Q6600, after all the difference in price between the $999 QX6700 and the $851 Q6600 isn't that much, especially when you consider that you'd have to wait an additional 2 - 3 months before the Q6600 makes its debut. Now if the street price of the QX6700 ends up being much higher than its 1Ku pricing then the Q6600 may end up being worth waiting for.

Looking towards the future, gaming will be going multi-core partially because of the fact that if you want to get good CPU performance on the next-generation consoles the developer needs to make good use of all available cores (consoles breed efficient programmers). From the descriptions that Remedy and Epic have given us, it looks like dual cores are a clear winner in the next generation of games, and quad core may be what's necessary to get that extra level of smoothness or detail when it comes to terrain or physics simulation. We don't expect dual or quad core to be necessary for gaming anytime in the next 9 months but before 2007 is over expect to see some very enticing titles that make good use of that second core. Four cores will eventually be utilized, but it's tough to say to what degree until the time is upon us. Our expectations put quad core as being a fringe benefit in 2007 but more of a tangible ally in games by the time '08 rolls around.

Workstation users can rejoice however as most workstation apps are very well threaded and because you can now build an extremely powerful workstation using nothing more than desktop parts. You get CPU performance that used to require a very expensive motherboard and registered memory in the same machine you use for everything but work. Obviously the new target for workstations will be eight cores through two sockets, but if you don't quite want that much processing power there's this new category of home workstation PCs that's created by Kentsfield.

And what about AMD? As expected, 2006 has turned out to be Intel's comeback year, and it won't be until the introduction of Barcelona in the middle of 2007 until we really see a performance competitive AMD. Of course AMD's 4x4 has yet to launch, and while it will be a monstrous platform, it will be even more of a niche product than Intel's $999 Kentsfield. While Kentsfield will work in many currently shipping Core 2 motherboards, 4x4 is an entirely new platform using Socket-1207 (not AM2) CPUs. As much as AMD wants 4x4 to succeed, what we're really waiting for is Barcelona.