Intel Core Due Procesesor, two chips in one?

Question

I have a Dimension 3000 3ghz, that is abit old and has started to fail on me. Before i completely dies, i want to upgrade to something similar but am having a hard time finding something with 3ghz +. All i see are machines with 2.8 that say intel core due processor...what is that? does that mean that the chip is two chips in one but each is 2.8 making it 5.6??
I see a great deal on a machine with 1.86 that i would like to purchase if the actual speed is 3.72

Answer 1

The older systems based on the Pentium 4 chip used a process of many lanes for doing things. The problem with the chip was that each lane had a specific function. If you had to do a specific function, then during that time slice, only a few lanes were in use. The newer chips, besides having the equivalent of two CPUs on them can use their lanes for more functions. That means, if I have something to do that is not filling lanes, then I can also run a few more lanes of traffic during that time slice. Effectively, the new Core 2 Duo processors are faster on a CPU to CPU basis than the older Pentium 4 chips.

Therefore, a 3GHz P4 is slower than a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo.

As a side note, be sure to get 2 GB of RAM if you are going with Vista.

Answer 2

No, Core 2 Duo is two single core processors on a single chip Core 2 quad is four single core processors on a single chip What next updates? It doesn't matter. It will be at least a decade, probably TWO decades, before the software catches up to a quad-core chip. Right now, the very latest releases of Windows 7 are not fully SMP-aware. Thus, a quad core processor is an over-priced dual core processor. And a 8 or 10 or 100 core processor would be a very expensive dual core processor. Unless you are running some flavor of unix. But most people run windows, and windows doesn't use more than two cores. Even then, it doesn't effectively use even TWO cores.

Answer 3

Yes there are two cores on this chip.

No that doesn't make it 2.8 x 2 = 5.6GHz, it's a lot more complicated than that.

To take full advantage of a multi-core CPU software has to be written to use more than one thread, no current games are and neither is a lot of desktop software. Multithreading is difficult and requires different development methodologies and tools. I wouldn't expect to see multithreaded games appear any time soon, maybe in 3 years time.

A multi-core CPU is more useful in servers, for instance a web server will get a big boost from this kind of chip. At the moment this is most useful on the desktop if you are running something that is resource heavy like a game and other software at the same time like TeamSpeak or WinAmp or Windows wants to do something in the background. Then that task will run on one core and the game on another and neither will be interrupted by waiting for the other.

Answer 4

A proccessors speed can only be measured in GHZ if their from the same family (ex. Pentium 4,Core 2 duo,Core duo)A pentium 4 is designed to run at crazy clock speeds to make up for its extremely long pipes (about 2x the length of AMDs which allowed it higher clocks speeds)and made for some awesome marketing hell a Core 2 duo 1.6 is faster then a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.7ghz
Most high budget relatively new engine games have multi threading.

Answer 5

Intel Core Due and Duel core processors have "two" individual processors with a separate cache for each.

Answer 6

yes, basically that's the idea. 2 chips working simultaneously together for a more efficient system.

Answer 7

Go here and click on the "view demo".

Answer 8

yes two in one , you may say one helping the other !

Answer 9

when one of the processors is overload,the other one will start.. check this out for more details: ( http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/index.htm )