Looking at the endless benchmarks we’ve conducted over the past few months, it’s pretty clear that certain tasks such as Video Encoding tend to work better with Intel CPUs while AMD CPUs excels at other apps like games. Now, with the introduction of dual core CPUs, theoretically, the equation should remain the same. However, we know that theory doesn’t always translate well in real-world tests and that is pretty much the focus of our article today- measuring the efficiency of the second core on dual core CPUs by Intel and AMD.

Let’s make a couple of things clear before we start. First of all, this is NOT a direct comparison between an AMD and an Intel CPU. Instead of looking at individual scores produced by these CPUs in single and dual core modes, you should really be looking at the percentage difference between single and dual core performances of each CPU. Secondly, most of the applications don’t really make use of the second core today and thus we have restricted benchmarks to the apps that do make use of the second core. This means that you won’t see any gaming benchmarks on the following pages.

For conducting these tests, we have used a Pentium4 2.8GHz HT CPU along with the Pentium D 820 CPU which is also 2.8GHz but features dual cores. On the AMD side, we’ve used the FX-53 and X2-4800+ CPUs, both of which are clocked at 2.4GHz. One might ask why we’re using the highest-end X2 dual core CPU and the lowest end Pentium D dual core CPU and the answer is- that’s all we have with us at the moment. Since both the single and dual core CPUs are identical is speed and cache sizes, it shouldn’t really matter what speed CPUs we’ve used as we’re basically measuring the percentage difference between the dual and single core performance on AMD and Intel CPUs.

On the Intel side, we’ve used the Gigabyte 955X chipset GA-8I955X motherboard with 2x512MB OCZ DDR2-667 memory modules while the AMD setup was made up of the Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI motherboard with 2x512MB Corsair DDR400 memory modules. Both the setups were tested with the nVidia 7800GTX Graphics card and running Windows XP SP2 with the latest official chipset drivers from Intel and nVidia.