Thread: Single vs Dual vs Quad

I'm sure this seems a silly question to most, but I can't understand processor speeds, is a dual core processor that does 3.00 GHz just as fast as a quad core 3.00 GHz? Or is the quad core twice as fast?

I understand it depends on the application to use all the cores, but say if it could, what would be best?

What other sort of factors effect a processors speed?

I will say this, It all depends on architecture. Whether or not the application can use all the cores is relevant only to the user and his budget. Now a days a Dual-core is almost a bare minimum. The Newer processors don’t always have new Architecture but if it does that’s what would make one of the same "speed" faster. So yes, an i7 will probably beat up a Core2Duo whether or not it supports all 4 cores. Same with Phenom over AthlonX2.

A normal PC has a lot of things going on the background. A dual core processor allows your PC to work on 2 things at the same time, so doing 2 things at once is nearly 2 times faster than 1 processor working on 1 thing for a second, working on something else for a second. However, a dual core processor does not make doing 1 thing twice as fast. Does that make sense? The more a program or OS is optimized to use more cores that simply means it can spread more work out to more processors cores. But it does not mean that if a program is only doing 1 thing at a time, more cores will help much.
Now, take for instance your OS, it has a lot going on the background. Windows can use 1 core to basically perform all of that work, while another core is running your video application that is running, or the game you are playing. So everything seems much faster and smoother. But 2 cores is not twice as fast as 1 core, and 4 cores is definitely not 4 times faster than 1 or even 2 times faster than 2 cores. But more cores, when programs or your OS can make use of them do have a pretty profound impact on OVERALL system speed and performance.

There are many, many things that determine how much work a processor can do in a certain amount of time, and exactly what it is all dependants on. There are entire books written on the subject.

I just installed Windows 7 32 bit on two of my friend computers. One is a AM2 DELL with a single core 3500 at 2.2 GHz or 2.4 GHz not sure which. Not that Windows index score is worth to much, but the AMD scored a 4.3 believe on the CPU score and the other computer was an Older Celeron at 2.96 GHz single core. It scored a 3.7 on the Windows ranking system. So I would also agree that architecture has a lot to do with Speed, not just the clock speed on a processor.

It used to be that all processors had one "core" but about 4 years back it was getting harder to make faster processors so manufacturers made dual cores. These were just two of the earlier processors sharing a socket on the mb.Triple and quad cores ... well they just added more cores

Theres a great article on this site in the cpu section about how more cores affect performance.You get a good gain going from 1 to 2 and a good gain going from 2 -3
but very little extra from 3-4.

A quad core processor has 4 cores that run at it's rated speed. For example the Phenom II 965 runs at 3.4Ghz, each individual core runs at 3.4Ghz. What this does is allow more work to be done at the same time allowing for better multitasking. There are also more and more programs being created that can divide their work load among multiple cores so that it performs better when given more cores.

Think of it like your kitchen vs. the kitchen in a restaurant. You have one oven in your kitchen, and maybe it takes 30 minutes to bake a cake in it. A restaurant might have 4 ovens, and they can bake 4 cakes at once, but their cakes aren't ready any faster than yours is, there are just more of them.

Programs are like recipes - if you have the right kind of program (recipe) you can take advantage of multiple cores (ovens) by doing things in parallel. If you had four ovens in your kitchen you could cook a dinner by putting a roast in one oven, vegetables in another, a cake in another, etc. so that everything could be done at the same time. This would let you prepare a dinner faster than if you had only one oven.

Some programs are able to organize their work in parallel like this and take good advantage of the extra cores. Others are not (but may still benefit by not slowing when you run them at the same time as other programs).