INTEL'S FIRST quad-core processor, code-named "Kentsfield," is now set to arrive in November, a few months earlier than originally anticipated. We already discussed the basic technology behind Kentsfield in our first dispatch from this year's Fall Intel Developer Forum, so I won't delve into it again here. The underlying premise is fairly simple, though: take a pair of Core 2 Duo chips, cram them together into a single package, and you have a "quad-core" processor that fits into one socket. This beast can then be dropped into a standard Core 2 Duo motherboard for mega-multiprocessing bliss under a single heat sink.

But how does such a thing perform? We have our first glimpse at an answer to that question today with a quick set of Kentsfield benchmark results compared directly to today's fastest desktop processor, the Core 2 Extreme X6800.