PriceSCAN Blog: Core Wars

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Core Wars

Computers | Jun 7, 05

The battle for dominance in the emerging dual-core processor market was joined a few days ago when AMD started sending out test versions of its new Athlon 64 X2, to compete with Intel's dual-core Pentium D and the dual-core version of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chipset released in April. Early buzz from reviewers seems to give much of the edge to AMD, but there's a catch for both. While generally faster than single-core processors when executing multi-threaded programs like some game programs and workstation applications, dual-core processors are actually slower than their single-core brethren for single-threaded applications. There is thus a real question as to how much migration from single-core processors can be expected with this generation of dual-core.

Often, we find that when a new technology is about to be introduced, the market anticipates that release and starts to discount the old state of the art. Thus, one clue regarding the future impact of the current version of dual-core technology might be found by examining the price behavior of state of the art single core processors. Consider the following PriceTrend graph of a single-core Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition (which does support hyper-threading). As you can see, the lowest price offered by a vendor on PriceSCAN actually shows a slight, recent rise in price, so it appears that there is as yet little or no dual-core anxiety in what is still a single-core world.

Time Period: 6/21/2004 through 5/30/2005
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price