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

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