quad cores?

[Glaucus]

When are quad cores likely to drop down to around the £100 mark either amd or intel. In other words when will they replace the x2 and core duo as the standard cpu?

 

[Glaucus]

I'm assuming they're gonna drop in price when Intel release their new cpus next year. Not sure about AMD though, because afaik they've not released a quad core yet so when they do i'm assuming they're gonna be pretty expensive like the intel quads were at first

amd's are out at £170. I'm looking at upgrading cpu, mobo and ram. But could really do with quad for encoding, now that encoding software uses dual cores.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=6&subid=1033

 

[Glaucus]

ah i hadn't seem them. thanks for that. I guess I'll have to read a review or two before I form an opinion but form the specs a q6600 should be better, as it's got more overall cache and it's also got a faster clock speed. although i've seen people in a few threads saying that you can't really compare processors just through their specs these days. and the phenom is a true quad core as well, whereas the intel quad core is just 2 dual cores put together. i suppose if you've alreayd got an AM2 socket mobo it might be cheaper and easier to get the AMD quads.

Unless like you say you want to get a new mobo, which I guess then it might be wiser to get an intel as they do generally overclock a lot easier.

yeh, it's on pre-order but ocuk never seem to get pre-orders wrong. Just relised it was the extreme editions of intel quad I was looking at. The normal version are around £140 which isn't bad. Would love to do a comparison.

The reason you can't compare straight speed is intel has less instructions which means it needs to do more clock cycles to perform complicated equations, where amd has a larger instruction set so can do the same equation with less clock cycles.

However saying that intel has been the faster for a few cpu development cycles. well since the early athlons really.