Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[JumpingJack]

You can scale differently, Intel (Core 2) is able to run many threads with good performance if the developer thinks about its weaknesses. If threads almost runs as separate applications not using that much memory with minimal talks it will work well using threads. Check heavy calculate applications, advanced compression. Those run well on Core 2. But this will change, it is harder for the developer to create threading like this, you need to think more about how the processor works.
Now when Intel will be out with i7 and it comes with the visual studio extensions helping developers to thread their applications this will change. Developers will not think that much about how the processor is constructed, if something needs power you just create more threads and try to split work among more cores.
There is always a performance penalty having threads that writes to same memory or needs synchronisation. C2D is ok handling this but C2Q isn’t able to handle that well at all. Running 10+ threads will be a big problem.

It is the same as those developers will not create games that need very high clocked cpus, they will not create games that are using thread techniques that runs badly for other types of processors and this is also a new area for game developers.

Oh, I see... the data shows that developers are programming for Intels weaknesses .... I see, thanks.

Running 10+ threads is a big problem for a Phenom to .... it's scaling stops at 4 threads as well.