what's the deal with these dual processors?

Question

all these dual CPU's now.. do they just double the power? like if you had a 1 Ghz times 2, does that mean you have 2 Ghz power? are they better than getting a fast single CPU? specifically i'm referring to games.

Answer 1

Depends on the game. Right now, most games probably won't take advantage of the dual core processors. And have a dual core doesn't mean you get double the speed.

Most games still are single threaded - meaning the run sequentially - do A, finish A, do B, finish B. It's like washing your dishes. You have one sink (CPU) - one person (one thread) can wash dishes. If you have two sinks (2 CPUs/1 Dual Core CPU) then two people (two threads) can wash dishes. But if you only have one person in the house (the program has only one thread), then having 2 sinks isn't going to help you much. Maybe a little because you can fill a large pot with water (run other programs) at the same time as you're washing dishes (playing the game), but both sinks can't be washing dishes without having a second person doing it.

Games have to become multithreaded for them to take advantage of multi-core CPUs. For example, if a game designer on a first person shooter type game could write the program so that one thread handles all the "characters" and the other thread handles all the scenery, then the play would potentially look better and you would be taking advantage of the multi-core processor.

Non-Multi-threaded games will see some SLIGHT (meaning YOU probably won't notice it) benefit from a multi-core CPU. Reason being that while one "core" handles the game, the other core can run other windows services like networking, and all the other programs that run in the background. And, strictly speaking, this isn't EXACTLY how windows would handle it, but it is conceptually what happens.

Answer 2

From what I understand, (as far as games go) Windows loads
alot of apps on start up. It takes up part of the CPU and basically
bogs down the Computer. But with Dual-Core, Windows can
use one side of the CPU, and Games, Apps and what-have-you
can run on the other side. It's not doubling up, it's giving you
2 CPUs to work with. That's why they say it's great for multi-
tasking.

Answer 3

older processors (bfor HT age) were hving only one core in them
& thus those wre single (virtually & physically)
HT age was also consisted of one core but it worked like hving two cores (thus virtually 2 cores)
& there u go.....
DUAL CORES are hving 2 cores physically
now u can estimate their performance......
hmmmmmmmm...........