Dip’s Hits

Obviously people don’t know anything about dual core and benchmarks.

Here’s a hint: two CPUs can do two things at once. One CPU can only do one thing at any instant. To make a single CPU do multiple things (multitask), it has to devote a small amount of time to each task. Then it does a ‘task switch’ to service the next task.

If you’re doing a benchmark of say.. a game.. then the fastest single processor is all that matters. Games are (currently) single-tasking. Which is why AMD has the FX series.

If you do multiple things- such as a web server serving multiple users, or a high-end application written to scale to multiple processors (database, some calculation software), then dual-core absolutely blows away any single-tasked processor, even at half the speed of the single processor (because there’s no delay in task switching).

Most desktop software (correctly) assumes that there’s only one processor so there’s no need to bother taking a task and writing software to use multiple processors. However, even Windows primitive OS can use multiple processors and assign processors to different applications if they’re running simultaneously.

A relatively new development is that of multiple *cores*.   We’ve had multiprocessor systems for a while- mostly servers.  But the clever AMD guys figured a way to put two cores on a single chip; dual-core.  It makes for some interesting chip designs, but is a lot cheaper than a dual-processor motherboard- and really has the same limitations (access to memory, peripherals, etc.).  Expect a lot more of this to happen in the future- 4 and 8-way cores will be here soon.
In conclusion: Gaming: fast single processor. Everything else- multiple processors/cores are better.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.