Today, in my quest to understand just what could make a computer cost $30,000, I’m going to drill down on the processor that PC World editors have chosen for their dream machine.

That would be the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Processor QX9975. The plan is to put two of these into the system.

This processor has four processing cores (whatever they are) and a 45 nanometer lithography, which is small. (I know what that means.) The processor speed is a blazing 3.2 gigahertz. If that were typing performance, I’m pretty sure your fingertips would catch fire.

Although descriptions of this chip say that it’s great for multi-threaded games and multimedia applications, it’s probably best suited for server operations — where a whole bunch of processes are hitting the computer for data access or processing power all at the same time. How could a lone human being sitting at a keyboard be that needy? OK, so I’m not a gamer and I don’t do high-end GPS mapping work. Maybe you could be that needy.

Of course, even as PC World was putting in its quad-core order, Intel was announcing that it expects to ship a six-core processor later this year, according to Computerworld.

The story quotes a senior VP and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group as saying, “The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance.” Plus, it keeps Intel ahead of the speed game compared to AMD, which just announced it is shipping a triple-core processor as part of its Phenom series.

I suppose that if you’re spending $1,500 to get a custom paint job for the box that holds the computer components as PC World is, you don’t want to be putting in a little $300 processor — or even two of them. You want to go with what’s newest, fastest, and priciest. In that regard, the magazine has done it again!

Posted on March 17th, 2008 by dian