OK, just wanting to get a thread started and people thinking - not wanting to start a flaming war. Has anyone actually thought of the benefits of dual core as opposed to "does it make Quake run faster". I think many people - including nearly every bench mark I have seen so far may have lost the point of dual core, if you want your games to go faster then please just buy a faster processor with a larger, faster L2 cache. Most programs (specifically content creation and office type apps) and games especially have only ever really been designed to run on a single core and hence it is not surprising that you never really see the extra gains people expect from dual core or HT (hence why under real load non HT enabled HT chips outperform their HT enabled equivalents). The real gain to be had is in true multitasking - and again here I am not just talking about having ten applications open, I am talking about virtual PC or virtual server running on that second processor, or in a dev environement having your SQL server running on one processor and your OS and compiler on the other. It has got to a price point (and please do not think I am complaining here) where people can afford workstation class machines but are not exactly sure what they are supposed to do with them once they have them up and running - and for some reason think that they really should be getting at least 60% more frames per second in their favourite first person shout them up and then bitching when they don't.
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Any one really thought of the dual core advantage
- Thread starter cyberjt
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unhappy_mage
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Have you thought of the advantage of putting line breaks in your posts? It helps seperate thoughts and sentences so people will read your whole post rather than get lost in your train of thought.
The gain I see is more CPUs to run folding@home. Borgs++! Like most things (think car or bed or phone), your processor sits idle most of the time, so it won't even be much of a hit to run FAH on them.
The gain I see is more CPUs to run folding@home. Borgs++! Like most things (think car or bed or phone), your processor sits idle most of the time, so it won't even be much of a hit to run FAH on them.
TheBlueChanell
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Well, The Reason Im Going DualCore Is Because, I was gonna get the 3700+ Sandy, Is the same as the X2 4600+ so why not get that instead of spending 300 some know and then 600 more when its needed in the near future.
The_Mage18
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When I build a new computer I'm definitly going dual core. On average I have quite a few apps open at one time and do run VMWare for development and testing (ever wonder what an app would do to a Windows install? Fire up a VMWare machine and find out without hosing your install).
With a dual core setup I could assign apps that are running to the second core exclusively leaving the first core free for use for whatever I happen to be doing at the time. Now that dual core chips and Hyperthreading chips are becomming more economically sound rather than an elitist's toy, more companies are going to devote time into writting apps that can take advatage of these options to create a better overall experiance.
With a dual core setup I could assign apps that are running to the second core exclusively leaving the first core free for use for whatever I happen to be doing at the time. Now that dual core chips and Hyperthreading chips are becomming more economically sound rather than an elitist's toy, more companies are going to devote time into writting apps that can take advatage of these options to create a better overall experiance.
I agree with that. I couldn't afford to go the Opteron route (even the buy one processor at a time approach), so I modded up some Dual AthlonMP lovin with the help of some AthlonXP-M processors. Now I have a workstation class machine with some a good deal of computational power, but I am not completely sure what I want to do with it. So it just does Folding@Home when it's on. It's pretty easy to rip through a lot of work packets with 2 processors.
With Dual Core lowering the entry cost to SMP goodness, there will probably be a lot of people not really knowing what they're getting with Dual Core so they can't use it correctly and will have no other way to describe their system other than "more responsive/faster" but with "no improvement in games".
Though since I do use a few multi-threaded applications with my Digital Photography workflow (RAW conversion is fast with a multi-threaded RAW converter) it has helped a lot. But other than that I can't help but wonder if there is anything besides F@H that could occupy my extra CPU time while providing me some enjoyment...
I don't know if this is considered multithreaded but if you have two processors and able to handle two threads couldn't the computer split the AB thread into threads A and B and run them through each core and come out and patch them backup as one, effectively doubling the clock speed, in theory of course. Am I missing something?
undyingshadow
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Patman said:
This is not as easy at it seems. Code is designed to run sequentially, and depends on data to be there from earlier in the program. If you split any program that isn't designed for it, it will break...badly. This is why coding for multiple cores is evil