Dual cores are becoming mainstream. Both Intel and AMD's flagship CPUs are using two cores on a single die, albeit, with different interfacing strategies. In addition, Intel offers the ExtremeEdition with HyperThreading capability to double the logical cores to a total of four units. On the other hand, the dual cores are offset by a lower clock speed, at 3.2 GHz, the Smithfield core lags 600 MHz behind the fastest single core Pentium4 offered by Intel.

There are benchmarks, there is thread collision, and there is exuberant performance in thread level parallelism-optimized applications. And then there is power consumption. Under peak load, we measured 147W isolated CPU power but that's only the beginning.