After a slow start, quad-core is catching on

This week AMD is expected to announce that it has sold more than 1 million quad-core processors, according to the site TGDaily. That sounds about right since the company previously said it had shipped 500,000 in the first quarter, and 400,000 in the fourth quarter last year. AMD announced its Barcelona quad-core Opterons in September, followed by Phenom desktop chips in November.

Meanwhile Intel has shipped more than 10 million quad-core processors, according to a recent report by Mercury Research. Intel introduced its first quad-core processors, the Xeon 5300 series server and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 desktop chips, in late 2006.

Those sound like big numbers, but in that period the industry shipped roughly 360 million CPUs so quad-cores represent only about 3% of the market by units. And the vast majority of those are Xeon server processors, not desktop chips. "I don't think anyone had imagined how popular the low-cost quad core server parts were going to be at the time," said Dean McCarron, Founder and Principal, Mercury Research.

Quad-core desktops have been slow to catch on because of the price, and because there are still very few PC applications that really take advantage of multiple cores. That is why the processor and graphics companies keep throwing money at universities to research parallel computing.

Despite the lack of real-world applications, an increasing number of consumers are buying quad-cores for "future-proofing" as prices start to come down. Intel recently cut the price of the 2.4GHz Q6600 to $224 and introduced a 45nm Penryn quad-core, the 2.5GHz Q9300, at $266. AMD prices the 2.2GHz Phenom 9550 at less than $200.

Those cuts are reflected in the latest system prices. The HP Pavilion a6460t with the 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2GB of memory and 500GB hard drive) is $830. The Dell Inspiron 530 with the older Core 2 Quad Q6600 (1GB of memory and 500GB hard drive) is now $750 with a 19-inch flat-panel display. Gateway is selling a retail desktop, the GT5674, with a 2.2GHz AMD Phenom 9500 (3GB of memory and 500GB hard drive) for $650. All of these have integrated graphics and Windows Vista Home Premium. Gateway also sells retail models with Intel quad-core chips. The GT5678 with the Q6600 (4GB of memory, 750GB hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 2400XT graphics) is $850.

The cheapest quad-core, however, is an AMD triple-core, which is technically the same chip with one core disabled. The HP Pavilion a6450z with the 2.1GHz Phenom 8400 (1GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive) sells for $600. Gateway offers a model, the GT5670, with the same Phenom chip, and 3GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive, for $550. But you'll pay the price in terms of performance.