Now you know about Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips featuring a processor composed of two cores. The chip maker may do many things, some of them mistaken, but you can’t say it doesn’t look to the future. Recently it’s been showing off a chip with four cores. You actually have to ask though, who needs this much computing power? Fine, the answer could be you, depending on types of computing tasks you do.

To advantage from this, you must be doing type of work that can take benefit of all four cores. I mean video editing and rendering. You also want a new motherboard to run this beast: a 965 or 975X chipset will do it, nothing less.

The four core processor also uses much power. The Core 2 Extreme X6800, with two cores, uses 142 W in idle mode and 165 W with a full load. The four core processor, on other hand, uses 167 W just when it’s idling, and at full load slurps down a whopping 260 W! Still, thinking that we are talking about twice as many cores that are less power than you would expect it to eat. And it’s still less than Pentium Extreme Edition 840 ate at full load.

Intel’s four-core processor runs hot, which is what you would expect from something that uses that much power. For testing chip, temperatures were given in degrees Celsius, and they were so high I almost though they were Fahrenheit especially after I did Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion. Can you imagine a chip that peaks out at 150 degrees Fahrenheit with stock cooling? Maybe I am explaining my non-techie to side, but to me that look like a chip only an over clocker.

Speaking of over clocking, chips work at a minimum clock speed of 2.13 GHz, and will possibly also be available at 2.66 GHz. It must be simple to over clock, though; some tests specified that Intel’s four-core processor must run quite stable at 3.4 GHz.

Thus, overclockers and video editors will like these new chips when they hit the market. In fact, some applications may even run twice as fast with a four-core processor. But key word here is “some.” Until there are more applications that can take advantage of all four cores, the rest of us might not notice any serious development over what we now have. I think those applications won’t be too long in coming.