Intel Corp (INTC)

[SemiconEng]

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPU

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/05/review_intel_pentium_dual-core/
Verdict
Would we buy a brand new PEE-based machine? Probably not, but that's the answer we give with most new technology. We said it about Serial ATA, PCI Express, DDR memory and DDR2 memory, and now we're saying it about dual-core processors - ultimately, the price premium for the Extreme Edition will be too high.

That said, dual- and multi-core processors are definitely the way forward. Unlike Hyper-Threading, using a dual-core processor really is like adding a second CPU to your machine, rather than faking it up, as HT does. You really do have double the processor resources, all the time, not just when there happen to be some execution units going spare.

As is always the case, early adopters are going to pay a high price for small gains, but as Intel rolls out dual-core chips across all its platforms, software developers will be forced to code applications with multi-threading support. In the meantime though, anyone who's doing a significant amount of multi-tasking should see a significant performance boost right now.