Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Dual Core versus Single Core CPU

I am about to build a new computer to replace a computer I built 4 years ago. The newer dual core CPU's are intriguing, but they are more expensive. Does anybody at this forum have experiences with the dual core CPUs, and do you think it's worth the extra money?

I will be using the computer to play games, video editing, music listening, statistical analyses (SAS), and surfing the internet.

Thanks for your help.

Here is a nice Article on the Subject

Ya gotta luv Google.

Know that for gaming having a dual core cpu won't really make a difference compared to the top single core cpus. That of course will change as devs will start coding with dual cores in mind. I built a new computer with a dual core AMD processor and I'm very satisfied with the performance it gives me when multitasking heavily.
Also I need to mention that in the case of some games it might take a little bit of effort to get them working with a dual core.

For instance some games would not work with the latest NVidia drivers, which were optimized for dual core use (that is fixed in the next release which you can optain, it's still beta though). In my particular case I just finished KOTOR 2 and at first it would not work until I updated to those NVidia drivers to the latest betas.

Morality: If you enjoy tinkering with your system and spending some time getting things working then by all means go with a dual core if you want. Just know that not everybody finds them to be worth the trouble you have to go through to get games working.

I'll be building a HTPC soon, trying to decide the same question. For the most part for HTPC's the video card does most of the work so CPU proc. is not as required.

Same here. Though I have a dual core in my latest machine I think I'll get a single core for my HTPC, since I would use it only to watch movies and gaming. I don't think a dual core would really make a difference right now, of course that will eventually change. Pricewise single core makes more sense for a HTPC.

Now some new sockets/cpus are coming out this summer and hopefully prices of current cpus should drop, so current dual cores might make sense then...

Dual cores is nice because you can do a ctrl+alt+del and say which processes run on which core, so you can speed up certain applications.

For instance, have your music or and all your other stuff running on one core, and have an mp3 encoder running on the other core. That way, the mp3 encoder gets all the speed it needs, and does not slow down any of your other applications. You could also be encoding an mp3 on one core, then decide to start up a game on the other core, and both appications would be able to run 100% on each core, not slowing down either one.

Some video editing programs might support multithreading or dual core. Games are getting to the point where the newer ones will be utilizing dual core more and more. Right now, you really will not see that much improvement in games. All it is is future proofing.

IMHO it is silly for people to get a dual core rig just for browsing the internet and things like that. I mean, HP and Dell are advertising Dual Cores to business people and general people, who will never utilize it. For you to utilize dual core, your program has to explicitly support it, or you like running many CPU-intensive programs at the same time which you can split up between cores.

Dual core does not mean twice the speed. It means you have an extra CPU for doing work on.

But, for someone like you I would recommend it since games will utilize it in the future, and so will some video editing apps. And really, for gaming, the video card is the thing you need to upgrade the most. If you buy a top of the line proc, it is good for at least 2 years. My FX-51 (2.2 Ghz) is 2 years old, and still is considered a fast processor. It only is about 400-600 Mhz behind the fastest processors today. So, I would go for it. You can keep the dual core for a while, and when the games come along in two or three years that really utilize dual cores nicely, you will be ready.

Dual Core = Good

HTPC and Video Processing would be very good reasons to go Dual Core. Hyper Threading from Intel turned out to be a very good thing (its sort of a single core simulating two cores). AMD's dual core CPU's are very highly reguarded. Some of the high end Intel chips have dual cores with HT so the OS thinks there are four CPUs.

There is NO doubt, the future of the PC will be in dual core, these next couple of years is just going to be the transition period where more and more applications begin to take full advantage of have more than one CPU to do processing on. Granted there are some things that will never really be optimal for dual core processing but overall I can't think of any real negative reasons to not spring for it if you can afford it.

Yeah, even Apple has gone to the dual-core architecture.

(I love my MacBook Pro)

Inane, I agree with you on the HTPC point only if using CPU intensive applications like FFDSHOW which hogs lots of CPU when scaling your images. Other than that, CPU's aren't hardly touched for HTPC front ends and software DVD Players.

Well as of right now using a dual core for FFDSHOW doesn't really improve anything since you're not dealing with a multi threaded app. I'd want to get the most horsepower for the price and as of right now dual core ain't it.

But as mentioned by INANE and Danmagic7 that is changing and soon most applications will be optimized for multicores (even consoles are doing this; think XBox 360...). Also if you're planning on having your HTPC do many tasks at the same time then dual cores would definitely help. I'm assuming you would be playing videos and nothing else at the same time.

Now if you can afford to buy a dual core then by all means do! My last build uses an Athlon 64 X2 4400 (overclocked) and I love it!

Thanks for your replies.

Similar to the HT world, it's really hard to make a decision with a new technology. New technology comes at a premium, and there may compatibility problems with existing programs. Additionally, very few programs have taken advantage of dual core.

However, it seems that dual core technology are here to stay, and I've read that the single cores will be phased out eventually.

Future software programs will make better use of dual core. The question is, will this be in the next two to three years (this is when I will probably upgrade)?

A few things to keep in mind:

Windows XP Home and Media Center Editions are not SMP (means Symetric MultiProcessing, basically dual-cpu) capable.

If you have XP Pro, Linux, etc. keep in mind that your applications may not support SMP. Most don't. So they will run on one proc or the other. Now your OS will try to load balance your running apps and services so that one CPU isn't fully loaded while the other is doing nothing, but you need to know some tricks to assign them specifically.

Most current games do not support SMP although most will run on an SMP platform just fine.

The Intel Hyperthreading scheme is a bit different. You will see 2 CPU's in Task Manager but HT simply handles multiple threads of an app using the same processor IOW it creates a virtual processor. WinXP knows this and handles it differently than a dual-CPU system in that you can use HT in XP Home, etc but not SMP.

exactly.

Just to add:
Even with XP Pro unless the app give special instructions to use the 2nd core it will not be used. If doesn't mean that if the first CPU is all used up for processing I do not believe the second core will be used (I maybe wrong about this) unless the app specifically can use it. The is a 64 bit version of XP that will use it as long as the apps support it. Most are web services and databses. So if you run server process such has HTTP, Java servers with Oracle connections then you will be using the Dual Core to its best ability. You won't be seeing any added performance until you hit something like 50,000k+ transactions per day. Low volumes will not see added performance. So if you had a single CPU single core vs Dual Core CPU at very high volume transaction hits and access that is only when you would see an advantage. I also know if you do 3D rendering programs like Maya and other of the such apps you will be rendering in the order of magnitude in seconds faster or minuted faster for really high rez 3D objects.
I am presuming WinXP Vista will harness the power of dual core...or so we hope.
http://techrepublic.com.com/2300-10877_11-6043696-2.html