10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors

In November 2006, Intel introduced the first quad-core microprocessors for the volume x86 market. The quad-core chips were designed to offer better performance compared with the previous generation of single- and dual-core processors. A little less than a

While Intel came to market first with a quad-core processor, it did so essentially by tying two dual-core processors together on the same silicon package. AMD took more time to bring its quad-core chip to market but developed a manufacturing process that

A 45-nanometer, quad-core Xeon processor is, on average, about two times faster than the previous-generation 64-nm, dual-core Xeons, according to new benchmarks released by Intel.

A quad-core Opteron processor will offer, on average, a 66 percent performance increase compared with a dual-core Opteron processor, according to benchmarking results released by AMD.

Within an enterprise, servers remain the ideal platform for quad-core processors because the chips are designed to take advantage of the multithreaded software that runs within most data centers.

While quad-core processors provide a performance boost for digital content-creation and allow users to run certain tasks simultaneously, most desktop systems–outside of gaming PCs and high-end models– don’t need quad-core chips.

Currently, neither Intel nor AMD offers a quad-core processor for laptops, although that could change by next year. That said, many analysts believe that most users want notebook processors that offer better battery life and less voltage, not more cores.

As virtualization becomes more important and widely implemented, businesses will need servers with quad-core processors to help support more than one workload on a system and to supply the computing power to run multiple applications or operating systems

With more processing cores in each server, quad-core chips can help IT managers cut down on the number of systems each data centers needs.

It’s only a matter of time before vendors offer up the next big thing in processors. Sun Microsystems already offers an eight-core UltraSPARC processor for servers, and Intel and AMD each have plans to move to eight-core x86 chips as early as the en

By 2008, both Intel and AMD will offer quad-core processors built on a 45-nm manufacturing process. This will increase performance while keeping the thermal envelope the same, allowing for performance per watt.

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