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Guide to the latest desktop processors

The brains of any PC is the CPU, or central processing unit. It is the single most important component of a desktop PC. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed, the better your performance. But once you really start to look into the complex world of CPUs, you'll realize that determining which CPU is the best for you is a little more complicated than merely counting gigahertz. For one, of the two major PC chip players, AMD and Intel, AMD's chips feature lower clock speeds than similarly performing Intel chips. And secondly, most new mainstream and high-end PCs come with dual-core or increasingly quad-core chips in them, meaning multiple processing brains on one physical piece of silicon.

Everything that happens inside your PC has to interact with the processor (note red arrow). However, there's a bewildering number of processors out there for all kinds of budgets.

	Intel: Founded in 1968, the Santa Clara company is currently the world's largest semiconductor company. It created the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. This was followed in 1978 by the invention of the x86 architecture which debuted in the Intel 8086 and today is ubiquitous in desktops and notebooks.

	AMD: Founded in 1969, the Sunnyvale company gained prominence with the debut of its Athlon processor in 1999, with its performance lead over Intel's competing processors over a significant period of time. Today, AMD is the second-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture after Intel.

If that seems like more CPU than you need, don't worry, dual-core PCs are still affordable, and they're becoming the norm. And it's a good thing, too, because dual-core chips are good at multitasking, processing digital media, and taking care of all the other modern tasks for which we use computers. And Windows Vista benefits particularly from a dual-core chip, as it's been written specifically with them in mind.

Right now, the superior chip technology comes from Intel, in the form of its new Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors. Thanks to recent price cuts, AMD's competing Athlon 64 X2 chips also offer strong performance for the dollar. In mainstream PCs, as long as you have a Core 2 Duo or an Athlon 64 X2, that's about all you need to look for.

Match the right processor to your computing needs »