Twice the power ?

[movingtables]

for the first time in my computer hobby i've fallen behind in my processor power knowledge.

to cut a long stor short:

Q) does a dual core processor meen double the power?
for example is a dual core pentium 3 gig the equal to 6 gighz power in real world terms ?

and a dual core pentium4 3 gig is faster than my single core pentium4 (3.4 gig) processor ?

 

[ByteJuggler]

In a word: "Potentially."

That is, for a task that is perfectly parallelizable into 2 threads, a dual core cpu will in effect be as good as having a single core at double the speed.

However, in practice you'll often not get "twice the power" since many programs are not designed to be multi threaded, and even when they are, sometimes the concurrency is limited (or other factors come into play), so the actual benefit might be substantially less than twice. For independent multi-tasking tasks however you can already often see near "twice the power."

So, it depends...

 

[smids]

On average it is like 1.5x the power for the reasons above. Hardly ever will you get double, and on things that are supposed to be coded, it is closer to 1.5x than 2, though some programs are better than others. It really is hit and miss.

BTW movingtables, loving the sig - we all know what today is .

 

[movingtables]

On average it is like 1.5x the power for the reasons above. Hardly ever will you get double, and on things that are supposed to be coded, it is closer to 1.5x than 2, though some programs are better than others. It really is hit and miss.

BTW movingtables, loving the sig - we all know what today is .

aww poor mr kent popped his cloggs lol..

on topic. from what you guys have said. that 2 X 3gig dual processor is faster than my 1 X pentium4 3.4 gig processor.
not doubly fast but on the whole around 1 ½ times faster than a single processor. still faster i guess. so is dual processors here to stay ???

 

[smids]

aww poor mr kent popped his cloggs lol..

on topic. from what you guys have said. that 2 X 3gig dual processor is faster than my 1 X pentium4 3.4 gig processor.
not doubly fast but on the whole around 1 ½ times faster than a single processor. still faster i guess. so is dual processors here to stay ???

I'm not overly impressed with Monday tbh, but I gotta say, that crash was good - the blood was funny (no, I'm not a sadist but it was a pretty good effect) however a number of flaws in the actual episode.

Anyway, on topic - yes, it is definitely here to stay. Lots of things are becoming increasingly threaded to take advantage of dual processor/dual core systems. UT2007 is apparently going to be completely multithreaded offering a huge performance increase over single core processors.
The other thing about dual cores etc is that things feel very responsive. There is no slowdown when doing something else. A DC + 2GB RAM = a very fast, very responsive system.

 

[TooNice]

It's like SLI, RAID-0 etc. etc.

The potential is usually close to 2x, but in practice it is not quite that.

Although, I do think dual core CPU makes a bit more sense considering that your PC do a lot of things in the background all the time.. so an extra core is potentially more useful.

(Likewise, two monitors double what I can see on screen, but not double my productivity )