Conclusion

Summing up I have to state that it will be very hard to draw a final line today. The thing is that Kentsfield processors have evidently got far ahead of their time. There are not that many applications yet that could use the potential of all four cores and load them to the full extent. In fact, these are only 3D rendering tools, video editing tools and a few codecs. These are the few applications where multi-core architecture can show its real best and prove adequate to its theoretical potential. Since there are not that many optimized applications, Kentsfield processors cannot yet become the ultimate leaders from the performance-per-watt prospective. Dual-core Conroe based CPUs still retain the leadership here.

However, despite this fact, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 launch is definitely a success. Firstly, Intel was brave enough to push the multi-core concept into the market. Intel was the one to give software developers to understand that the time has come to revise their algorithms dramatically. The upcoming year 2007 should become a turning point: we expect a lot of new applications that would benefit from systems on multi-core processors.

Moreover, smart pricing policy makes Core 2 Extreme QX6700 a very attractive purchase today already. Its frequency is only 10% lower than that of the top Conroe CPU, Core 2 Extreme X6800. So, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will be just a little bit slower than the predecessor in applications that do not support multi-threading. However, the are priced equivalently, so that the users looking at the price-to-performance ratio in the first place will be able to consider Kentsfield as a possible good choice. Especially since it will be extremely efficient in case of several tasks running in parallel even if they are not optimized for multi-threading. And in optimized apps, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is unattainably fast.

So, even if you do not yet see any tangible benefits from the quad-core Kentsfield processors for your particular case, the situation will undoubtedly change very soon. This new Intel solution has big future ahead.