Quad core worth its value?or wait for amd?

Question

i went tomshardware website saw q6600 was much better than e6750 and e6850.

in singapore

q6600 cost SGD461.00

e6850 SGD463.00

e6750 SGD322.00

im wondering why everyone is against quad core when it does have better performance and its price is around the same.

im confused whether to wait for amd new processor or....
because i heard that amd cpu + ati gfx card works well together.

Answer 1

First answer was totally wrong, second little better. The truth is, the quad cores sometimes outperform the dual cores, but not always. It depends on if the program is multi-threaded, meaning it can use more than one core at a time. Quite obviously the ones that can use multiple cores are going to be awesome on a quad core, 4 cores versus 2. But the ones that can't will not show an increase, as the higher clock speed of the E6850 will be best.

Most rendering applications, and quite a lot of media editing applications are multi-threaded, some games are, but not a lot. But multi-threading is the future, so I would say investing in quad core now is a very good idea.

As for waiting for AMD, AMD and Intel will both have new processors out within the next few months, so if you can afford to wait, then do so, and purchase whichever comes out on top when the dust settles.

Answer 2

The first question is, of course:

Are you doing something so compute-bound that 4 CPUs are needed, *and* that doesn't get bottlenecked on the single bus to memory (many compute-intensive tasks are also data-intensive, so 4 single-cores with their own memory busses gets better performance).

Unless you're actually doing something that can *use* 4 processors effectively, buying a quad-core is just either wasting your money or trying to compensate for some perceived shortcoming/esteem issue.

Answer 3

There is only one good thing about quad core... it will help to lower the price of dual core.

Let's face it... the bus will be the limiting factor. RAM and hard drive access will start to limit the speed that you can gain. It will be awesome someday, when hard drives are MUCH faster, and massively parallel buses, like a true 64 bit architecure becomes available.

but right now.... quad core is just daydreaming.

Good luck and Happy Computing!