CPUs: is it time to move to six cores?

Last week, AMD and Intel both announced plans to release their first six-core processors in March.  Are these new processors necessarily any better than the current crop of quad-core CPUs?  Should you upgrade as soon as you can?  We're not entirely sure …

We'll be looking at the latest generation of CPUs in a lot more detail soon, but that doesn't mean we can't give you a brief outline of our thinking now.  In general, adding extra cores will be of most benefit to people who use heavyweight multimedia apps.

If you spend your time editing and encoding video or you're a professional musician or photographer, then moving to a six core processor certainly will speed things up for you.  If, on the other hand, you use your computer for a little browsing, listening to streaming radio and reading e-mails from your grandchildren, then it's not worth it.  A dual-core processor will be more than adequate for your needs.

That just leaves gamers.  Although more and more recent games are optimised to run better on multiple core processors, we've seen in our own tests that quad core CPUs aren't always faster than dual cores; you can check that by taking a look at over Face-Off: Processors.  So moving up to a six core CPU isn't necessarily the only way forward: remember that for a better gaming experience, there's nothing quite like a good graphics card.

> Product Survey: Processors


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