Combining two into one to make something faster is an old practice in the tech industry. We RAID our hard drives together to get better performance and use our memory modules in dual channel for the same. With PCI-E slots, we saw SLi come back into action as well. Even multi-CPU systems have existed for a very long time, however, their use in a standard desktop/home environment hasn’t been pushed much. Looks like the time to take care of that has arrived as both Intel and AMD recently announced their Dual Core CPUs.

Just to refresh the non-technical people, every CPU has a core which is what the CPU is all about. Since most of the CPUs are covered with a heat spreader nowadays, you usually cannot see where the core of the CPU lies. The following is a picture of AMD’s previous generation Athlon XP CPU which does not have a heat spreader and the blue-ish rectangle you see in the middle of the front of the CPU is where the core lies.

Dual core basically means having two of those- basically two CPUs in one package. While we would love to show you how the dual core looks on the CPU we have with us today, we have to return this unit and thus don’t feel right about removing the heat spreader to take a peek inside. The advantages of having a dual core CPU instead of two separate CPUs is that the CPUs are connected internally which generally results in a faster communication between them instead of being externally linked through the motherboard. Also, both CPU and motherboard manufacturers save space by having just one socket instead of two which translates into saving costs.

One question that pops to mind is that since CPUs run hot nowadays, having two together would generate almost twice the heat and should require a much better cooling solution. While we haven’t tested other dual core CPUs, we can say that the one we’re taking a look at today- the AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ sure ran pretty cool- about the same as their single core Athlon64 CPU. The X2 4800+ has two cores running at 2.4GHz with 1MB L2 cache per core which makes each core identical to the current Athlon64 4000+ CPU. This is only 200MHz lower than AMD’s current highest-end single core FX-55 CPU. The following table shows the upcoming expected dual core CPUs from AMD.

 

CPU	Speed	L2 Cache	Price US$ (AED)
Athlon64 X2 4800+	2 x 2.4GHz	1MB	$1001 (AED 3684)
Athlon64 X2 4600+	2 x 2.4GHz	512KB	$803 (AED 2955)
Athlon64 X2 4400+	2 x 2.2GHz	1MB	$581 (AED 2138)
Athlon62 X2 4200+	2 x 2.2GHz	512KB	$537 (AED 1976)

Prices are usually a bit higher in this part of the world so expect to pay about 5-10% premium on the prices posted above. While you will end up spending on the CPU itself, what we like is the fact that you probably wont need to change your Socket 939 motherboard- most of the motherboards should work with a BIOS update. It seems as though AMD designed the K8 line-up with dual CPUs in mind as their implementation doesn’t look like an after thought. We wont go into the details of the architecture as much has already been written and if you want to learn more, we would suggest heading over to The Tech Report. We’ll just get started with our benchmarks so lets introduce the testbed.