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Intel Dual-Core Systems Begin Shipping Monday
ThinSkin writes "The wait for Intel's dual-core processor is over, that is if you're willing to fork over some dough for a Dell or Alienware system bundled with the chip. Intel just announced that Monday marks the first day dual-core systems hit the market with Dell's Precision 380 workstation and its next generation Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999. PC Magazine got a chance to play with the XPS system and came away quite impressed."
The system doesn't quite hit the perfect 60+ frames per second score in Doom 3 at 1,600-by-1,200, but no single graphics card solution has so far, and 40 fps is still quite playable.
Yeah, but Athlon 64 SLI graphics card solutions have. Oddly enough, PCMag only directly compares this Intel Pentium EE 840 box with an Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz box. Any hard-core gamer who buys an Intel dual-core machine to play his SINGLE-THREADED GAMES instead of an Athlon 64 dual video card SLI box is beyond hope. Torch your money responsibly, kids.
Dell and Intel get 100% from PCMag for "Best Bribes Paid". Geeze.
These are hitting the market but won't be shipped for a few weeks - or so I gather from what I read in TFAs. By "Hit the market" they seem to mean "vendors are taking orders" which - to me - seems meaningless.
AMD claims not to do this in one of the articles:
""'t is important to note that AMD only announces products when we are able to immediately begin shipping for revenue and that we have been shipping dual-core AMD Opteron processor production samples to customers and partners since January,' the statement added."
I guess we'll just have to see if AMD actually has products available at their release or if they're just doing the same thing Intel seems to be doing here.