The arrival of AMD’s first quad-core desktop chip has turned out to be something of a damp squib. Already a year behind Intel’s first quad-core offerings, the Phenom has seemingly failed to impress the testers from various hardware sites, despite AMD’s claims regarding the superiority of its native quad-core architecture over its rival’s technique of splicing together two separate chips inside each processor package.

However, this is probably all academic for enterprise customers. Most business applications are just not designed to make optimum use of multi-processor architectures, and this is not likely to change in the near future.

While quad-core chips have their place in servers and certain workstation applications, it looks like mainstream business computing will be run on dual-core systems for some time to come. Firms looking now to specify kit for their next desktop refresh would do better to budget for greater memory capacity rather than considering quad-core processors.