At the end of the Pentium 4′s era, there was an AMD vs Intel battle to speed up processors to extreme levels. When processors became hot enough to cook on, there was obviously something that had gone wrong. Intel was quick to release a dual core Pentium, and then its Core2 range. The Core2′s managed to bring power consumption back to sane levels and regain much of Intel’s street cred.

After dual-core, the obvious next step is quad-core. As the technologies to produce the internals of a CPU get more sophisticated, so more cores can be stuffed into a single processor. But is there a tradeoff?

Intel Core2 Extreme offer a huge performance leap over their smaller brothers and sisters. By definition, the Extreme series leave the bus and multiplier so they can be adjusted by the user. This is useful for those who like to overclock, but not for the vast majority of desktop computer users who just want things to work.

This processor offers a large 12MB L2 cache, which amounts to 3MB per core. This is an increase of 50% of what is found in the other dual and quad-core processors in the range. This is a real performance booster, as L2 cache allows information to be stored close to the processing core, for much faster operations on data.

A new motherboard will be necessary, look for one that supports DDR3, to really stay ahead.

When building a super-fast computer for gaming or heavy duty office work with processor intensive programs, this is a processor worth considering. Stay ahead of the curve, but pick something else from the range if you want value for money.

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AM2 was supposed to be the things of the future delivering the ultimate performance where socket 939 left off. With more memory bandwidth and a whole host of other features the new socket has not lived up to it’s much hyped beginnings.

XYZcomputing takes a look at the AMD AM2 to see just how it performs. Or more specifically, just what makes this computer processor that little bit unexciting.

AMD has a hard time keeping up with massive Intel, who have built such a strong market position that even a series of messups have managed to put much of a damper on their market sector. And although AMD were able to make the best of those blunders by Intel, Intel has now come back in force to once again compete with AMD.

XYZcomputing takes you through the overview to see what’s going on.

Energy savings is big business, especially in big businesses where the power bills for feeding hundreds of power hungry machines can be mind boggling.

AMD have had a great emphasis on how much power their processors can save, but this has mostly been aimed at the server market. These kinds of power saving are now available to the consumer market with the EE range of energy effiecient dual-core processors.

The biggest power savings come with the “Energy Efficient Small Form Factor” EE and SFF model which uses a pretty low 54W at idle. This is quite a saving compared to the Intel rivals, but might not be enough warrant it.

Perfect for use in home theater systems though and small form factor boxes where cooling is a very sensitive issue.

The full low-down can be found at Tom’s Hardware