Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > CPU > Are Three Cores Better Than Two?

Are Three Cores Better Than Two?

12:58 PM - November 28, 2005 by Patrick Schmid

1. The Opteron Multicore Mixup
2. Get Ready For Multi Processing
3. It Works! Sort Of
4. Test Setup
5. Benchmark Settings

For AMD and Intel, it is just a matter of time before single-core processors become a thing of the past. The future thus belongs to devices that might pack two or eventually more than a dozen physical processing units onto a single physical die. However, it is a common assumption that processor cores have to come in even numbers, which is, in fact, not the case.

When we compared a dual-core and a dual-processor system, we first mentioned the possibility that the two might work. IBM's processor for the Xbox 360 is a triple core, which is a pretty good indicator that this configuration is viable. Although the power requirements are clearly different, there is, after all, no difference between single- and dual-core processors.

For our dual-core and dual-processor article, we used an Asus K8N-DL Socket 940 dual Opteron motherboard. For the processors, we used the same single- and dual-core Opterons from our previous project. Both the Opteron 248 and 275 run at 2.2 GHz, with the latter being the dual-core product.