The chips will be hot, two prescotts joined together, that means a new all copper heatsync needs to be used, the current LGA775 Heat synce is huge, I built two LGA775 systems about two weeks ago, they actually don’t run too hot but i guess they could be cooler but oh well…

there is a bandwidth issue since not all of the dual core chips will be getting 1066Mhz FSBs, this may not be a problem if the number of “lanes” between the chip and northbridge is doubled, creating something like dual channel memory interleve, then we would need double doual channel interleve to get around a memory bottle neck, or maybe 800Mhz DDR2 would do the trick in a doual channel interleve mode. Then we’ll need to have a dual channel interleve sata raid interface thingy to eliminate a bottleneck there, then we’ll need to get more pci-express lanes, so that we can have two video cards in at the same time, in a SLI simmular interface, but both cards getting a full 16 lanes each, instead of 8 lanes each in the Nvidia SLI spec.

Then the only noticable preformance differenc will only be seen in apps that make use of multi threading programs. with 2 cores you get twice the ammound of bandwidth for the same speed (Ghz) and slightly higer latencies, which the Prescotts are nitorisous for a long execution pipeline and slightly higher ‘lag’ then AMD processors, to reach about an effictive double in performance, but not necessarily.

Still I plan on building a dual core, fully decked out system somethime next year. Two WD raptors 74GB 10,000RPM (the next gen ones comming out later this year with native command queing) and dual channel DDR2, best PCI Express graphics card avalible, Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platnium, possibly a PCI Express version if avalible at the time that i build the box, best Gigabyte mb money can buy, and the list goes on. It’ll tie me over with one upgrade for most of my time in college.

Oh yeah the difference right now is that intel’s dual core will be ‘ready’ for consumers, eg you and me, in may, AMD’s dual core thingy is a server chip.

Now that there is an actual reason for 64bit memory computing, yeah you heard it first here AMD and Intel (along with the powerPC G5 chip) are not true 64Bit processores. Intel’s EMT-64 (Enhansed memory technology - 64bit) is the most accurate name for it, they only added enough instructions to handel more then 4GB of RAM and a few 64 bit instructions but not all of them/ the entire processor itsn’t able to exicute 64 bit instructions…