Does dual core mean double the speed?

[Brad]

Originally Posted by BrandiDup

I'm not good with all of the computer hardware stuff but since I've had this laptop, I was always under the impression that it was 1.73 ghz b/c thats what it is, but last night my husband told me that the dual core means it's basically 1.73 x's 2. I don't really understand the reason behind having a dual core instead of just 1 core (is there such a thing? ). What is the reason behind a dual core versus just a regular computer that's super fast or something?

The reason behind the move to dual/multi-core processors stems from the fact that sooner than later we're going to hit a brick wall when it comes to how fast we can get a processor to run. Basically we've gotten to a point where CPUs are running at such a fast clock speed that pushing the limits year after year in an attempt to one up the other guy (Intel vs AMD mainly) is not longer a fessible route. While there are still improvements in clock speed these days the gains aren't going to be as much as over the last 6 years.

Due to all that the recent trend has moved to putting multiple processors on the same die, most of the time two or four processor cores are used.

So how do you compare a dual-core to a single core? Lets use two processors as an example;

1) "Single-core" processor running at 3.0GHz.
2) "Dual-Core" processor(s) running at 1.5Ghz each.

At first glance you'd assume both machines would run at (nearly) the same speed. However this is not the case! Each system will run better or worse than the other depending on what type of software you're running on the processor(s).

For example if you ran a game made in 2005 on these machines the single core (faster clock speed) processor would probably run said game faster than the multi-core machine. The reason for this is simple; The game was no coded with multi-core processors in mind, so it runs on one processor at the speed of 1.5Ghz (half the speed it would run on the 3.0GHz machine).

But what about the multi-tasker? Say you're into encoding video like I am, which is a very processor intensive task. On my single-core machine I can encode video all day long but it lags everything else while I'm doing it. On a dual-core machine I could use one of the cores to encode a video file while using the other core for things like web browsing, my e-mail client, photoshop...or whatever else I feel like running without experiencing the "lag" I would experience on a machine with a single processor in it.

Right now most software is made with one CPU in mind, coding something that takes advanage of multiple processing cores is hard. So at the moment you only see it done in mostly highend stuff (photoshop, professinal video editing, video games...etc), but as the years go on there is no doubt in my mind that it'll become the norm...and will become "easy" (or at least eaiser than it is today).

Right now, for a normal user, the gains are mostly in multi-tasking...depending on what you use your PC for.