Why you shouldn’t wait for Yorkfield or Nehalem

Lately, I’m seeing a lot of information on these two different micro architectures. The new Yorkfield’s are supposed to have 12MB L2 cache which will supposedly spring up all the programs that depend heavily on cache. However, is this really needed? Not really.

In all reality, I have never seen a difference between a single core and a quad core. I’m currently running a quad core Q6600 in my main machine, and I honestly still see the same lag that I see with dual and single cores. Is 12MB of cache going to improve this? Probably not. For a few applications such as Folding@Home, yes it will be very beneficial as the SMP client depends heavily on it.

For everyday users anything over a dual core is honestly overkill. The only time you are going to use this high-end of a processor is if you do encoding of any type or any type of extreme gaming.

Instead of waiting for these new high-end processors, I recommend that you get a new processor right now if you are wanting one, instead of waiting. I would recommend the Core 2 Quad Q6600 as it is future proof with quad core and fast enough for the next several years. There is absolutely no reason why you should wait if you aren’t a professional designer or some other occupation that requires such a processor.