By Sarju Shah - Posted on Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Intel's Core 2 Duo volley scored a solid hit on AMD, which had dominated the desktop performance segment for a number of years with the Athlon 64. The Core 2 Duo's gaming performance moved Intel out of the dreadful Pentium 4 performance backwaters into the processing lead in a single day. Upon release, the Core 2 Duo instantly became the processor of choice for gamers and power users alike.

Speed was king in the Pentium 4 era, but parallelism is the new mantra of the multicore age. When Intel's NetBurst P4 processors hit the GHz wall, the solution was to add more processing cores. If you can't go higher, go wider so-to-speak.

Unwilling to sit still and enjoy its newfound success, Intel decided to move up the quad-core "Kentsfield" CPU launch from the first half of 2007 to the last quarter of 2006. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor will be available by mid-November, just in time to go up against AMD's "Quad-father" 4x4 platform. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will carry the familiar $999 extreme processor price tag at launch.

Quad Core

Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 follows Intel's new naming scheme to the letter. The Q signifies that the CPU has four processing cores, and the X, of course, makes it "extreme." The 6700 part of the moniker aligns perfectly with the rest of Intel's Core 2 processor lineup, as the QX6700 runs at 2.66GHz, the same speed as the Core 2 E6700 CPU. Each pair of CPUs has 4MB of L2 cache, bringing the total L2 for the entire processor to 8MB. Like other Core 2 CPUs, the quad runs on a 1066MHz front-side bus.

The QX6700 will be built on a 65nm process and is 64-bit capable. Following the trend of other Extreme Edition processors, the processor will come unlocked, which will give system owners a wide range of overclocking multiplier options.

The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is pin-compatible with the rest of the Core 2 family. The processor should work fine with Intel's "Badaxe" 2 motherboards. Third-party motherboard manufacturers will release BIOS updates for existing Core 2 motherboards to enable quad-core compatibility. Whereas the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will work in most existing Core 2 motherboards, AMD's "Quad-father" platform will require a new dual socket motherboard to support two dual-core processors.

Performance Testing

We brought in an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and a 975X Express-based motherboard for some hands-on performance testing. We didn't have an AMD Athlon FX-62 in our labs to test against, but we used the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ as a fill-in. Trust us when we say that the FX-62 wouldn't have done much better. We stuck with a single GeForce 7900 GTX on the video card side to balance out the high-end CPU performance with an equally powerful graphics card. We also included encoding and extreme multitasking scenarios with our tests because few games currently support multicore processing.

Are you going to upgrade to Intel's new quad-core CPU? Or do you think you'll stick with dual and single-core CPUs for a while longer?