4 Intel Cores fight 8 in multicore battle

IT WAS good to have time for some fine tuning of my new reference benchmark platform, the 3,333.5 MHz, FSB1667 quad-core Xeon X3220 platform, further referenced as The Quad. As I was doing that, my home was invaded by one truly big nasty piece of hardware - the HP xw8400 dual Clovertown Xeon 5355 workstation, an eight-core monster with 8 GB memory and OpenGL graphics - while not as big as some servers, the new workstation really made my lab room feel somehow smaller. Since the system had only WinXP 32-bit installed, and the same OS also run on The Quad, I was itching to compare them in several benchmarks: some generic, other known to be well threaded.