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**ray**

On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:56:27 -0500, krw wrote:

In article ,
says...
On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 07:45:20 -0500, Neil Jones wrote:

Hello,

I am seeing a lot of marketing of Dual Core systems. As you have
guessed, I am not a hardware geek. What is the big advantage of dual
core systems? I know it is like having 2 processors. Will each core
perform at the high GigaHertz speeds that the marketers used in the past?

I plan to buy a new PC sometime early next year. Does the current
software technology take advantage of the dual core hardware? Is there
significant performance speed on the system?

Thank you in advance for any information.

Regards,

NJ

The others have done a good job of covering the technical aspects. Just
let me add that whether you will see any gain or not depends a lot on what
you do. I've read that a dual core processor does not real run as fast as
a two cpu system - it gives the equivalent of about 1.6 processors.

A dual core system *IS* a two CPU system.

It is and it ain't. It is still not as efficient as two cpus on two
different chips - there are some shared resources that slow things down.

If you
run a bunch of small jobs at the same time - you'd see an improvement. If
you typically run one cpu hungry job at a time and it is not written to be
multithreaded, then a dual core system will run no faster than a single
core of the same speed. Most processes are not written to be
multithreaded. Optimization for multiple processors is a very difficult
task.

Windows (and Linux) run many threads at a time. Dual cores will
help some in any case. With a dual processor/core system if one CPU
hog is running the system will still be responsive. A single CPU
system may be brought to its knees.

However, to get any benefit out of a dual core system, make sure it
has enough memory and fast disks (plural, preferable). If they get
in the way, the second processor is going to do nothing for
performance.