Intel Dual Core Pentium: Benchmarks!

ExtremeTech has a "Performance Sneak Preview" of Intel's Dual Core Pentium: the Pentium Extreme Edition Model 840. They compare it to the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (the previous Extreme Edition) running on the older (yet better becuase it has a faster FSB)Intel D925XECV2 motherboard. The benchmarks show that becuase of some limitations in the new motherboard the new dual core chip does not always beat the single-core chip. From the review:

First up are the results from SYSmark 2004, which simulates real-life workloads for both Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity. The content creation portion uses apps like Photoshop, 3D Studio, Dreamweaver, and others, while the office productivity tests use typical office apps, such as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.
SYSMark 2004 Results
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What's interesting is the flip-flop between the Office Productivity result and the Internet Content Creation test. The dual-core Pentium 840 trails the 3.73GHz P4 Extreme Edition in the Office Productivity test by a fairly substantial amount. However, it pulls way ahead in the Internet Content Creation test, which uses a number of threaded applications, such as 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Premiere. The office applications clearly aren't benefiting from the 840's dual-core design, since they likely aren't threaded. However, the Internet Content Creation apps in this suite clearly have some multi-processor (MP) awareness, as evidenced by the 840's higher score here.