Plaease educate me on Quad-Core technology
 

I would like to purchase Intel's Kentsfield or the quad core system sometime next year.

I have a few questions concerning this technology:

1) How come each core has a lower clock speed than what is the fastest CPU out right now?

2) If I multitask a lot or if I do video editing/encoding, would there be any bottlenecks in other hardwares? Like the processes trying to write to the harddisk at once, etc?

3) Does quad core let me use both 32 bit and 64 operating systems?

Thanks

Don't buy into the hype. Wait for the quads to come out, and then get yourself a top of the line dual core after the prices plummet.
There is little software which can take advantage of this(or even will need to), and I doubt that the pending operating systems will be able to properly take advantage of them either.
Unless you plan on ripping a DVD with DeCSS, compute the amount of electromagnetic interference on a PCB, playing a game, and torrenting some files all at the same time. Then it might be useful.

For the most part, the only differences of any significance between the quad and dual cores will be the L2 cache size, and right now, it will be more than sufficient.
Wait for multi-core programming and architecture design to mature more, before investing in it.

1) Just stop. The Kentsfield E6600 has 2.4Ghz for each clock. If you know anything about the Core2s you'd know that these are goddamn fast. Just because it has 4 cores doesn't mean it's gonna have faster clock speed than a dual core. It's the same architecture.

2) You would probably benefit from having more than one hard drive to write and read from because hard drives are slow.

3) Yes. Every chip made now is 64-bit with backwards compatibility for 32-bit applications. Wait until Vista is released for switching to a 64-bit OS. XP 64-bit is a bad idea.

Although "Quad-Core" technology is exciting, there is currently no software that utilizes the multi-threading that can be done with 4 processors in the consumer segment. Although ther server segment is eager for Quad-Core for slightly more obvious reasons, the desktop segment is not really optimized for such an environment.

In fact, if you want to really boost your PC's specs with best in class hardware, your best bet would be to save the money you would spend on Kentsfield and get a Core2Duo with a top graphics card. A computer with a 4 core proc and a decent graphics card will not perform like a 2 core pc with the best video card.

Your best bet is to get the dual core when the prices go down.

I still think that instead of calling kentsfield a quad core processor, it should be called a pair of dual core processors. There are two die's on this thing.

Thats interesting to know. Thanks