Dual-Core Athlon 64 Benchmarks Leaked
Although you can't purchase one yet, and although no official benchmarks have been released, you can get more than a little information on AMD's upcoming dual-core Athlon 64 setup from an Italian website more than willing to sneak you a peek.
Source: GEEK.comWorking in collaboration with an unnamed Taiwanese partner, the folks at HWUpgrade.it managed to get their hands on a Socket 939 CPU sporting two cores, each running at a full 2.4GHz. This is only marginally slower than the flagship 2.6GHz CPUs powering the Athlon 64 FX line, indicating that AMD may not have had as many thermal issues integrating two cores as previously thought.
Benchmarks revealed significant performance gains for multithreaded benchmarks, with Cinebench showing an 87% performance gain going from one core to two. Interestingly enough, the dual-core Athlon 64 outperforms a true dual-CPU Opteron 250 2.4GHz setup, coming in second only to a dual 3.6GHz Xeon setup with Hyper-Threading turned on (four logical CPUs).
Workstations and servers are likely to be the primary beneficiaries of dual-core CPUs, though, as most games are not multithreaded. AnandTech has a nice technical explanation on why games will lag on the multithreaded bandwagon, and why their conversion to multithreading is a foregone conclusion.
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