If your apps of choice take advantage of them, Intels Quad performance is untouchable (just try an overclocked Q6600 and you'll agree), but maybe you're not among those users. Price could also be considered another drawback (even though the Phenom 9500 is quite affordable), so dual core processors are still a reasonable buy.

At this point, the question is to find out which one offers the best quality/price ratio. By "quality" we basically mean performance per watt, and no less than 17 processors (eight from AMD and seven from Intel) are put through the paces. As a side note, the variety of cache sizes for the Core 2 based chips turns out to be quite entertaining and shows how lyou can go "down" before actually killing the performance.

Looking at the results, it's hard to recommend an AMD processor, so we won't. You could say that the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ makes for a good el cheapo PC (integrated graphics, of course), but performance per watt leaves no doubt about the superiority of the Pentium E2160. On the "upper side", the Wolfdales dominate, specially the 8200 (which can be had for about 150€).

Link: X-bit labs.

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