Sunday, April 4, 2010

Dual core and Quad core processor comparison

My friend recently assemble a system with Quad core Q8400 processor, and coincidentally also my office NComputing server using Quad core Q8200. When trying to compare it with Core 2 Duo processor with nearly the same speed, no significant differences in some aspects even faster than the Core 2 Duo processor Quad core.

Today more and more people wrong perception about the true performance difference between Dual core processors and Quad Cores.

Honestly, there are many people out there who think that the computer system with Quad Core processor is "better" than Dual Core processors simply because it has 2 times more core.
I do not blame them, probably because they remember the quote "Two heads are better than one" especially if there are 4 heads definitely faster:)

Facts about multi-core processors

Let us just compare the two Intel processors that is widely used today.
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 2.93 GHz per core with 3MB L2 Cache sold $ 120 in Bhinneka.com.
As a comparison, Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 is 2.66 GHz per core with 4MB L2 Cache sold $ 174 in Unity. Because the same L2 cache is divided into the core of each, the second processor basically have almost the same amount of cache (E7500 slightly larger), making them almost the same except the processor core number of them. Because each processor speed is around 2.6 GHz for both processors, does this mean that the quad cores are two times faster than dual core processors?
The answer is no! This is the main misconceptions about people with multi-core processors. You do not double the speed of one core with core number of GS to get the "number of" speed multi-core processors.
Two processors in this example actually appear in almost the same speed.

Actually, less than 1% of the software in the market can take advantage of multiple cores (dual Core ismore, while the 4 core is very rare), which means that most of your programs (even if not all) can only be executed in one processor core only. This means that the speed of your program depends entirely on the speed of one core. You might say "what if I run many programs simultaneously (multitasking term)"
The fact is, most programs can perform tasks faster than you can switch to another program. The most notable exceptions to what I said earlier, is on video and photo editing software (and some games), which usually take advantage of all your processor cores.
In Realistically, you will not feel the speed difference between the systems with dual core processors and quad-core processor systems, unless you run software video / photo editing.

Manufacturer processor (Intel, AMD) is actually realized this, but what they care about, as long as they conduct and acceptable processor market them no problem.
So what is the purpose of my writing ? Do not spend your money on quad-core processor unless you create and edit video professionally, or run special software that can utilize all the processor cores.
You better spend your money for a processor with dual cores or systems with GHz and higher L2 cache.

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