Intel Quad Core - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700

8 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy Intel’s Quad Core - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700

2/11/06

After the race for Dual Core Pprocessors has ended, and it seems that Intel has trounced AMD with the Core 2 Duo, the Quad Core fight is on. Both AMD and Intel are working hard to release Quad Cores (for the simple people that means four cores plugged into one socket). Intel seems to be riding the wave and has beat AMD and just released the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (till now it has been known as Kentsfeild) the first Quad Core Processor for desktops. (See the specs below).
But one has to ask, is any point in having a quad Core processor? Sure Intel and AMD are fighting it out and trying to get the better processor out as fast as they can but are they really better?  Are their any real advantages to owning a computer with a Quad Core? Should I go get one right now?
Here are 8 reasons why you should stay away from Intel’s Quad Core - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700:

1. Like the Dual Core Pentium D that Intel released to match AMD dual Core chips, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is just two Core 2 Duo processors ‘glued’ together. What we basically have is 2 Core 2 Duos working together but cannot share their resources. So although you have 8MB of cache between the 4 Cores, it is not shared Cache and suffers from the same problems that the Dual Core Pentiums suffered from. Cache not being shared means that data has to be rewritten from one core to the other and spare cache space cannot be taken advantage of by the other dual core. To put in more professional terms:

As a multi-chip package, the QX6700 contains two copies of a relatively well-integrated dual-core design. The two cores on each chip share a 4MB L2 cache between them, complete with dynamic partitioning and the ability to hand off ownership of data from one core to the next. Unfortunately, the integration between the QX6700's two chips is less than ideal…
The two chips must coordinate to ensure the sanity of the contents of their respective L2 caches via this bus. That will sometimes mean writing modified data out of one chip's cache into main memory and then reading it back into the other chip's cache—a positively eternal operation in CPU time. (techreport)

2. Another problem from gluing two cores together: FSB usage. Both Dual Core chips use the same FSB to talk to the rest of the system, including both the RAM and I/O devices.  That is a lot to handle. Also because of the two processors, there are now three electric lodes sitting on the front bus (two CPUs and the core logic chipset) that is a lot to load on the FSB. So don’t expect to get much from over clocking.
3. And another problem from the ‘glue’ – no smart working between the Cores. One Core can be working at 100% at the other Core will be sitting around and biting its nails. There is no technology to have smart division of work between the 4 Cores (for a more elegant explanation see anandtech)
4. Heating problems/Performance  per Watt efficiency  – One of the breakthroughs with Intel’s Core 2 Duo was the drop on the TDP (Thermal rating) and the great advantage of performance per watt. Both are lost with the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is basically two of Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6700. The E6700's thermal rating, or TDP, is 65W, meaning, the QX6700's TDP is exactly twice that of the E6700 at 130W. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is basically going back to the days of the Pentium.
5. Motherboard support – Although the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 fits into Intel socket 775 boards and should be able to run on any motherboard that supports Core 2 Duo with a BIOS update, one should check. Intel has had such problems before.
6. Performance – It seems that although more usually means better, so 4 cores should be better then 2, it just doesn’t work like that. After running the bench test it seems that quad core do not off any significant increase in performance. In fact some benchmarks show that Intel Core 2 Duo out performs the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, because of the problems mentioned above.

   “For the most part, you can expect the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 to perform like a Core 2 Duo E6700 in applications that use only one or two threads, but the QX6700 may prove slower in some cases due to additional bus overhead or bad thread management in Windows.”
   To see full benchmarks and performance comparison check out techreport  & xbitlabs.

7. Software – The hardware has gone way ahead of the software. There just isn’t much software out there that can take advantage of a quad core processor. Software for Dual Cores it just getting started so the hardware is a generation ahead. Even extreme users i.e. the gamers will have a hard time finding games out there that can take full advantage of the Quad Core - Core 2 Extreme QX6700. Since computers are around to run the software, there is little point in having a computer, when there is no software around to use it.
8. Budget – Last but not least, after all that was mentioned above you got to ask yourself is it worth departing with 999$ for being able to say that you own an Intel Quad Core - Core 2 Extreme QX6700 since there doesn’t seem much else to do with at this time.