The present and future of personal computing is multicore.

On the desktop, it began with technologies like HyperThreading and dual-socket motherboards with Pentium® processors.. Now dual-core systems have gone mainstream, and quad-core is the hot new thing. Available today, the quad-core Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme Processor QX6700 is the performance champion for media encoding and 3D rendering. It’s also at the heart of great gaming platforms, and as game engines become more threaded, this CPU has room to grow.

For hardcore enthusiasts, the word “enough” usually isn’t in their vocabulary. And if you crave even more compute power, then four cores is a beginning, but eight cores is the destination. There’s been some talk about “eight-core ready,” where some quad-core platforms can be upgraded to eight-core in the future. Why wait? If it’s eight cores you want, here’s a system you can build….TODAY.

We’ve nicknamed our eight-core rig “the V8,” since it has eight computing engines. But before we get into its speeds and feeds, let’s cover how eight cores can change your computing life, and how applications can and will take advantage of them.