DrAkeNgaRd_KneLL said:
wow, what's that dual core thing... it sounds really good! i bet it'll be really fast
i need info about that :happy:
It's the new Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition or AMD Athlon X2.
They all incorperate two CPU "cores" on one chip, which effectively
means you have the power of a dual processor system with just one
processor. The Pentium Extreme Edition also adds Hyper-Threading
to each of the cores, resulting in
4 "virtual" CPUs!
Dual core CPUs (like dual processors) only work fast with multi-threaded
applications btw, which most games (supposedly) are
not. For things
like video encoding it's great of course (assuming the encoder is multi-threaded)
and also if you like running many applications at once.
That last bit is what I would find a dual core CPU useful for -- I frequently
re-encode anime fansubs to DVD while burning a DVD (I also download tons
and tons of DVD Video ISO's I must admit) while also downloading new stuff
using eMule, Azureus (BitTorrent) and NZB-O-Matic (newsgroups),
ALL at the same time.
Some links:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2397
Btw, the main reason why Intel and AMD are switching to adding more cores
to one chip is because adding more Ghz isn't the way to go -- apparently the
ceiling has been reached in terms of Ghz's (they've reached the physical limits
of what you can do in terms of power etc running through small silicon chips).