Hi guys. i have a amd athlon dual core processor and i know dual core means 2 proccesors and when i go to system settings it says my speed is 2.31 ghz. Does that mean per processor or for both of them combined?
Do not make the mistake of thinking that this means you have a 4.62GHz processor. You don't. You have two cores on one die each running at 2.31GHz.
cheez203 said:
For example I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz. That's a dual core but when I rate the core the combined performance is 3.795 or something like that.
I found out the speed of my cores on this website
Try to run the test on Batman Arkham Asylum. that one gives you your core speed. Not all game rate the speed of the core
Each core allows you to do a task. Having multiple cores allows you to do multiple tasks at once.
Let's say that the task is baking a cake. You have to mix the batter, then bake the cake, then decorate it. These three steps cannot be done out of order, you cannot do two or more at the same time. You have to do the first step, then do the second, then the third... so more cores (more people cooking) wouldn't speed it up.
However, if the task was making spaghetti, then multiple cores could speed it up. You could have one person cooking the sauce, another cooking the meat, and a third cooking the noodles, all at the same time. Three cores are being used, the entire process is almost three times as fast as cooking them all in order one at a time.
So whether programs benefit from multiple cores or not is entirely up to the program in question.
http://rydian.net/myths/view.php?id=processors.txt
This explains more.
Let's say that the task is baking a cake. You have to mix the batter, then bake the cake, then decorate it. These three steps cannot be done out of order, you cannot do two or more at the same time. You have to do the first step, then do the second, then the third... so more cores (more people cooking) wouldn't speed it up.
However, if the task was making spaghetti, then multiple cores could speed it up. You could have one person cooking the sauce, another cooking the meat, and a third cooking the noodles, all at the same time. Three cores are being used, the entire process is almost three times as fast as cooking them all in order one at a time.
So whether programs benefit from multiple cores or not is entirely up to the program in question.
http://rydian.net/myths/view.php?id=processors.txt
This explains more.
D
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Great explanation Rydian. From: Virginia, just caught my eye...I thought it was a coincidence, but we're in the same state >_>. lol On another note someone might want to talk about the current state of affairs with multi-core optimization and hyper-threading.
Virginia Beach here.
What I meant was more that the task itself determines if there can be a speed boost from it, if it's a task that's not suited to parallel processing, then no amount of smart programmers can make it get a boost from multiple cores.
Take a browser, for instance. It has to request the data, get it, assemble it into the bones of a page, apply the stylesheet(s), and then whatever javascript processing needs to be done. That's a pretty linear task, so the only real speedups we've had consist of breaking down tabs into multiple windows (IE8 and chrome do it, firefox will be doing it soon) so that at least multiple instances of the browsing task can gain a benefit, though not a single one.
When you toss in plugins and such (which usually get their own thread in multi-thread browsing) there is a more noticeable benefit, especially for crap like flash, though.
What I meant was more that the task itself determines if there can be a speed boost from it, if it's a task that's not suited to parallel processing, then no amount of smart programmers can make it get a boost from multiple cores.
Take a browser, for instance. It has to request the data, get it, assemble it into the bones of a page, apply the stylesheet(s), and then whatever javascript processing needs to be done. That's a pretty linear task, so the only real speedups we've had consist of breaking down tabs into multiple windows (IE8 and chrome do it, firefox will be doing it soon) so that at least multiple instances of the browsing task can gain a benefit, though not a single one.
When you toss in plugins and such (which usually get their own thread in multi-thread browsing) there is a more noticeable benefit, especially for crap like flash, though.
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