Tim Smalley & Richard Swinburne

If you think quad-core is excessive but dual-core is old hat, how about a Ménage à trois from AMD's new Phenom X3 8750? Is it the cheap and cheerful multi-threading meat eater enthusiasts have been waiting to lap up? We just had to find out...

Intel's first 45nm desktop CPU from the Penryn family launches in the middle of next month. Today, we have a look at the new Core 2 Extreme QX9650 with side-by-side performance comparisons against a range of dual and quad-core CPUs in an x86-64 environment.