Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[bobs10]

Dual core mainstream processors are products whose time has not come yet. The driving force in that area will probably be games. Until games start appearing that can take advantage of multiple processors, dual cores processors running games at slower speeds will be slower than single processors running at faster speeds. See the Anandtech Smithfield review.

A better case can be made for 64bitness, but for most consumers the main advantage here is future proofing your machine.

It looks like 64 bit games will appear in volume way before they're multi threaded. As far as machine costs go; another year+ or so, and all processors, except the very low-end, will be 64 bits. By that time the high-end consumer machines will be 64 bit, dual processor machines with multi-threaded software following later as the number of dual core machines in the market place increases.

Generalized dual core machines running 64bit/threaded game programs should be able to give even the most specialized game machine a run. How much longer is it going to be before games are limited by the people running them rather than hardware, even at HD and better graphics?