Its barely been a year since the launch of first dual core CPUs and today we already have a Quad Core CPU from Intel with talks about an incredible 80 core CPU in the not so distant future. This probably means that the “MHz” race is dead and Moore’s law will now take shape in the form of increasing cores instead of raw speed.

Although this is a good thing, we really need applications that are multi-threaded and can utilize additional cores at their best efficiency. Since the launch of dual core CPUs, we have been witnessing an increase in the number of multi-threaded applications- especially with 3D Workstation and Video Rendering applications. However the soon to be released Vista Operating system along with the new Microsoft Office 2007 supposedly makes much better use of multi-threading as well. On the Mac side, OS-X is already multi-threaded and the upcoming 10.5 (Leopard) should make it even better in this regard.

Coming back to our product under the spotlight today, the QX6700 is basically two E6700 CPUs stuck together- the same process that Intel did with their initial dual core Pentium D CPUs. To refresh your memory, the E6700 is a dual core 2.66GHz Core 2 CPU from Intel with 4MB L2 Cache. So the QX6700 becomes 2 x 2.66GHz dual core CPUs with 2 x 4MB L2 Cache. While on paper, this doesn’t sound the most efficient and elegant solution, performance numbers speak otherwise as found by comparing the initial dual core efficiencies between Intel and the much more elegant solution offered by AMD.

One thing that does take a hit is the power consumption. The QX6700 can’t turn the second die off and has to provide the same voltage and frequency to both the dies. This isn’t much of a concern when the CPU is under full load, but wasting unnecessary power on an app that isn’t multi-threaded doesn’t look too good. Speaking of power, the TDP on the QX6700 is 130W or double of the E6700’s 65W

The good thing is that the new Quad Core CPU should work with almost any motherboard that supports the Core 2 CPU with just a BIOS upgrade. We had the CPU with us for a limited time and managed to run our standard set of benchmarks. Without further chit-chat, lets see how the QX6700 performs. Intel sent us their new 975X motherboard with the QX6700 for testing which is what we've used along with 2x1GB Corsair 1066MHz memory modules and the nVidia 7950GX2 graphics card.