I Use AMD Phenom Chips with XX50 Numbers The XX00 numbers are the older ones that had
a bug in them, causing lockups on heavy usage, unles it was patched to run slower in the mother board bios. XX50 CPUs  have dedicated cores. The newer Intel I7 have dedicated cores also.
I also prefer a cpu that runs a little slower and quite a bit cooler for long lasting hard running renders. ( XX meaning the different model numbers of the CPU family).