Core 2 Extreme QX6700

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The problem with gaming benchmarks is that they often lag behind the hardware. All of the games we're testing today are at least a few months old, and while it would be nice to have more titles that can take advantage of at least dual core processors, the challenges involved in building a game engine that can truly take advantage of multiple processor cores are difficult to overcome and require a lot of time. We are aware of at least three companies that are working on engines that will benefit from CPUs with more than two cores, however, and hopefully more companies will follow suit in the future. The "dual core revolution" is not yet two years old, and the majority of modern games require more than two years to design and develop. There has been a great focus on improving game graphics over the previous decade or more, but it looks like we may finally be reaching the point where other aspects of gameplay are becoming important, and in order to flesh out those other areas (physics, artificial intelligence, particle systems, number of entities, etc.) multiple processor cores have a lot of potential.

[...]With only a single $999 part, and even taking into account January's $851 Core 2 Quad offering, quad core is not going to be mainstream anytime soon nor are most applications ready for it. It's also worth mentioning that there's no point in waiting to upgrade to the Q6600, after all the difference in price between the $999 QX6700 and the $851 Q6600 isn't that much, especially when you consider that you'd have to wait an additional 2 - 3 months before the Q6600 makes its debut. Now if the street price of the QX6700 ends up being much higher than its 1Ku pricing then the Q6600 may end up being worth waiting for.

Looking towards the future, gaming will be going multi-core partially because of the fact that if you want to get good CPU performance on the next-generation consoles the developer needs to make good use of all available cores (consoles breed efficient programmers). From the descriptions that Remedy and Epic have given us, it looks like dual cores are a clear winner in the next generation of games, and quad core may be what's necessary to get that extra level of smoothness or detail when it comes to terrain or physics simulation. We don't expect dual or quad core to be necessary for gaming anytime in the next 9 months but before 2007 is over expect to see some very enticing titles that make good use of that second core. Four cores will eventually be utilized, but it's tough to say to what degree until the time is upon us. Our expectations put quad core as being a fringe benefit in 2007 but more of a tangible ally in games by the time '08 rolls around.

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Therefore, as a matter of perplexity Core 2 eXtreme QX6700 provokes one natural question: "What is it for?" To showcase Intel's technical potential? Undoubtedly. By the way, this is pretty obvious: boast, if you have something worthy. This task is accomplished. To provide users of a relatively small group of applications with a more "extreme" processor? This is accomplished as well.

But the usability became narrower. Looking at how slowly software developers are mastering dual-core support that came like a bolt from the blue, we can assume that quad-core support will be implemented in the even more distant future. Besides, many developers think it's ok to implement "partial" multi-way support, instead of its fully-fledged variant (16-way, for example). The average score we obtained proves it all right. According to it, a usual dual-core Core 2 eXtreme X6800 is generally faster than QX6700 in the mix of single- and multi-threaded applications. X6800 still has lower "professional" average score that reflects "serious" resource-intensive applications. And that's right: exactly this software requires a 4-core or 4-processor machine.