iam2thecrowe :
no, an i3-3220 is faster than a q6600 at everything. 2 cores with hyperthreading can do the work of 4 cores.
2 HT cores are lesser than two actual physical cores. That is why HT is added. With 5-10% increase in die area, you get ~30% performance increase..
Caveat : the application should benefit from HT. This means, it has lots of memory-toCPU copying on one thread, during which the other thread can do CPU work. If the application has interleaved memory access, HT will give no benefit. Plus, cache is shared between real and the HT core. So if one thread has lots of cache thrashing, the other thread will keep waiting for execution. And the overall cache is effectively halved between the two threads.
Regarding this particular case, you could possibly be correct. I have no data off-hand to back my claim.