With all due respect Nova, I think your reasoning might be flawed.
I think that solely on the basis that you draw your conclusions from the synthetic scores the calculations of which were almost comlpetely arbitrarily decided by Futuremark.

As far as I know, the benchmark could automatically assign a bonus for more cores just by counting them, and not by actually measuring the increase in performance.

I think using a couple of different benchmarks would provide results that are a bit more "scientifically plausible" ...

What the results seem to indicate is that a one to one matchup between CPUs and GPUs gives better performance, which seems intuitively correct. Which tells me that a chip integrating a CPU, GPU, and possibly a physics engine, or a GPGPU, should give fairly linear scaling as you double or quadruple the number of these integrated chips.

So the emphasis should be on the CPU/GPU integration. It will be interesting to see what AMD develops under the Fusion project.

But the key factor is still going to be the ability to structure the application to take advantage of the hardware architecture. Hopefully, more will be done to automate this process.

How about doing the same test with AMD branded stuff with crossfire. See if the scores fluxuate with the different CPU's then.

Intel is not the only player, and yes, I am an AMD fanboy.

Wow, Pay more than computer costs & run worse. Amazing, Must be transplantee.

Maybe problem is fundumentally CONTROLLERS just arn't going to allow that much higher of scores. Maybe its limit HDD cannt perform above. Yet something tells me any serious Gamer should consider Another Product entirely for Money. What if 2,000 stream processors also continue slide back. When Vantage first appeared, all sorts of ideas on why & what great numbers would come to, Came to NOT Much, is fact. So BE Dissappointed for price.

Arrrggggg, Me Baby Whites Seem Sickly.Kriel artists abound in ye waters.
Drashek

What junk is this?
3DMark has been dissed for years as a junk benchmark.
Even by The Inq themselves, and now it proves something?

This is too much, even for The Inq.....
Get Mike back in here, he would never have approved such rubbish.


So going by 3DMark06's 3Dmark score you only get a 15.65 percent increase when going from a single 9800GX2 with dual core CPU to a dual 9800GX2 Quad SLI, Quad core CPU. That is pretty lame for the extra cost and power used. I would of expected at least a 35% increase.

This is the most pointless set of articles ever, use 3dmark which separates GPU and CPU tests then combines them for a final score and then we are suppose to draw some conclusion from it? Daft I call it (except for the part where asus gives you a free system for this joke).
If you want to see the effects of number of cores vs number of GPU's on games you have to test with games that use the GPU and CPU massively at the same time, not some benchmark that runs separate tests for each function, duh.