Intel Pentium D dual-core desktop CPU

Pentium 4 670, too

KribiBench, however, is multi-threaded. That means the Pentium D 820's can load up a couple of threads at a time and execute concurrently. With that in mind, the £200 CPU is faster than any single-core Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 in the line-up. You can patently see where its strengths lie.

picCOLOR, an image analysis program, also shows better performance when two cores can be used in tandem. See how the PD 820 is almost as fast as a 3.8GHz P4 570, and only narrowly behind the £500 670. It's also faster than its direct AMD counterpart, the Athlon 64 3500+.

A multi-threaded (and HT-aware) version of LAME also shows just where the PD 820 is good.

The multi-CPU render from CINEBENCH 2003 benefits CPUs with Hyper-Threading and, to a larger degree, those with two cores. Again, all single-core models in the test are left wanting.