With the demise of single cores, dual cores and the slight¬ly costlier quad cores vie for your attention, and your cash! Dual cores typically have clock speeds higher than quad cores, although the two extra processing units on a
quad core give it an edge in case of multithreaded appli¬cations. Nowadays, even tri core processors are available (AMD Phenom).



Dual or quad largely depends on your usage. Gamers will want the fastest clock speeds (read dual core) while multi taskers will want more processing units. Dual cores are obviously cheaper than quad and tri cores, but the more the cores, the better the future proof¬ing. This is because applications are being continuously programmed with greater parallelism in mind, and we've heard ofIntel's plans to launch eight core processors next year (read Nehalem).