Intel's quad-core Penryn processors have been out for quite some time - even if they're nearly impossible to come across. AMD, on the other hand, have only just rolled out some bug-free chips late last month, the flagship product being the 2.5GHz 9850. Despite the $50 price differences (AMD's being the cheaper of the two), ExtremeTech have directly compared AMD's flasgship with Intel's 2.5GHz Q9300. The performance of both chips greatly reflects their price, with the Q9300 storming ahead in the majority of the benchmarks.

The Core 2 Quad Q9300 was able to hit 3GHz pretty easily. Since the core multiplier on the Q9300 is locked, we simply set the FSB clock to 400MHz. The Q9300 has a 7.5x multiplier. Setting the FSB to 400MHz also pumped up the DDR3 memory clock to DDR3-1600 speeds. We could have manually reset memory clocks, but the system seemed stable at 3GHz. It's clear that even at 3GHz, the Q9300 still has some headroom... As you can see from the results, both quad core CPUs performed about where you'd expect, given their relative prices. The Phenom X4 9850 is currently AMDs fastest shipping quad core CPU, but it's definitely a budget processor. The Intel Q9300's pricing is still pretty reasonable, but some users considering a Q9300 might think about spending a few dollars more for a Q9450, which clocks a little higher, but has double the L2 cache.