The CPUs

These two CPUs look identical on the outside, and they kinda are, except that one of them has twice the amount of cores as the other.

First off we have the Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 processor, which I will refer to as the dual core CPU. It features the Conroe core, 65nm technology and clocks in at 3.0GHz. It has 4096 KiB of L2 cache. It was released on July 22 2007 and can be bought these days for just under US$200.

In this article, I will compare this to the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor which I will refer to as the quad core CPU. CPU-Z lists my processor as having the Kentsfield core but the QX6850 has the Kentsfield XE core, which has an unlocked clock multiplier. A Kentsfield or Kentsfield XE core is basically two Core 2Duo cores stitched together and squished into the same package. Like the Core 2 Duo, it uses 65nm technology and clocks in at 3.0GHz. It has 2 x 4096 KiB of L2 cache. It was released six days before the Core 2 Duo model. It can be bought these days for just over US$1000, making it a whopping five times the cost of the Core 2 Duo.

So apart from the QX6850 being fives times the price and having double the amount of cores and cache to boot, these CPUs are essentially the same. Same design. There's no front side bus differences and they're running at the same MHz. So this is truly a test of two vs four cores, although the cores also include the cache attached to each core.