But then of course software has to be written with multi-core processing in mind first.Īccording to our previous tests, there are currently no games that take advantage of the additional two cores however software such as Photoshop, Pinnacle Studio Plus, QuickTime and 3D Studio Max all greatly benefited from the power of four dedicated cores. Rather than having a single core that tries to juggle all these strenuous tasks, multiple cores can work together, executing work simultaneously. The idea of having more than one core per processor is basically to allow individual cores to perform separate tasks, allowing more to happen at once under the same roof.Īn example based on a gaming environment would be: while one core is taking care of graphics, another can handle physics calculations, and another looks after artificial intelligence, and so on.

While current software is still trying to catch up with dual-core technology, we did find a number of powerful applications that in fact saw some benefit from having four dedicated cores at their disposal. Given how powerful the Core 2 Duo had proven to be, we wondered how much of a performance gain this new quad-core version could offer.Īs we discovered back then, given the right conditions the quad-core version can outperform the Core 2 Duo with ease. Hot on the heels of the Core 2 Duo launch, Intel came out and released the world's first quad-core desktop processor last November.

Intel core 2 duo 2.4 ghz price