Ready for the era of dual-core? You now have a choice of dual-core processors; and based on PC World tests, the winner is clearly AMD's new Athlon 64 X2, which handily outdistanced a dual-core Intel system we tested last month.
Our tests indicate that with both AMD's and Intel's dual-core chips you'll obtain the biggest performance benefit when you work with multiple applications at once or when you use multithreaded software, designed to recognize more than one processor.
Dual-core chips build in two processing cores, in effect giving you two CPUs in a single piece of silicon. You also get two L2 memory caches, one for each core; the 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chip that we tested, for example, had 1MB of L2 cache per core. The 64-bit Athlon 64 X2 chips ship in June, joining currently available dual-core Opteron server and workstation CPUs. Systems should soon be available from vendors such as Acer, Alienware, HP, and Lenovo.
PCs with the new chips, which will come in several variations, should be available now. Also, you should be able to upgrade your existing Athlon 64 PC to the new chips with just a BIOS change, whereas to convert an Intel unit to dual-core you'll need to purchase a new motherboard.
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