Do dual core processors work in tandem constantly?

Question

I noticed that my system properties box switches between saying 1.00 GHZ and 2.00 GHZ from time to time. Does this mean that only one processor is turned on at certain times, or is my system info box just wrong?

It is in AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ if that helps...

Answer 1

You are witnessing AMD's Cool & Quiet feature in action. I recommend you read the entire article for a better understanding, but here's a page from it that says the following:


http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/24/dual_core_intel_processors_for_low/page15.html

"The Athlon 64 X2 certainly is no power miser, but it is an interesting option if you need high performance and still want to maintain low energy consumption. It will be fast enough for many high performance application demands, but it will also be relatively economical thanks to Cool & Quiet, which reduces the core clock speed to 1.0 GHz when the system runs idle."

Answer 2

dual core cpus only work in tandem if a program you are running is written to do that. Right now very few programs can do this. The benefit to dual core right now is the ability to multitask. I'm not sure why your system properties is giving you different readings. Do you have the latest driver installed for your cpu? AMD has a driver for their 64bit cpus.

Answer 3

The most likely thing isn't that one processor is being lazy, but that the Operating System doesn't know what is going on - older versions of Windows definitely had trouble displaying correct info.
Check your O/S is fully service-packed and has all available updates.

Check the AMD site for any possible suggested updates as well, for example, this kind of thing:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?lc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=228&product=385148&dlc=en&softwareitem=ob-36731-1

Answer 4

well processors work hard when they have a load of stuff to do. it is more for multitasking, so if your doing one thing or whatever on a low powered program or internet, you wont see much action in your processors. try going to task manager and opening a bunch of programs at once and youll see processor loads go up to almost 100%. check windows update and makes sure you installed everything on your motherboard installation cd.

Answer 5

It's duo core... The speed is correct... It will switch from time to time depending on the work done using the processor... Nothing wrong with it...