Duo Processor

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by lionrampant, Aug 16, 2006.

  1. lionrampant

    lionrampant Specialist

    Is each of the two chips in the new Intel duo core as fast as a high clock speed single chip? Also how to you tell the PC to use one of the cores for one application and the other core for another?
     
  2. thesmokingun

    thesmokingun MajorGeek

    not sure about the second question...but for the first, if you have 2ghz duo proc, then it's (2) 1 ghz cores. my guess is vista is primed for that purpose
     
  3. Wyatt_Earp

    Wyatt_Earp MajorGeek

    No....

    Both cores are running at the rated clock speed.

    You don't have to do this manually. The operating system and the CPU handle it.
     
  4. ASUS

    ASUS MajorGeek

    If you want to manually set the CPU Affinity, this can be done with Task Manager. :)

    Simply open Task Manager, select the Processes tab, then select which process or task you'd like to modify, right click, go down to Set Affinity and select which CPU (or virtual CPU in the case of HT) you'd like it to use.
    (The change isn't permanent)
     
  5. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    Download and install Everest

    Computer specs—Hardware and Software.
    Everest Home Edition. www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

    then go to Mother board and select CPU.

    This will tell you about your CPU (s) installed and their speed (s) Bazza
     
  6. Redminnow

    Redminnow Private E-2

    Just to confirm i got one of these the otherday... Both cores run at said speed

    i.e. mines a 1.86 so both cores run at 1.86

    there combined speed is double that
     
  7. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    Trouble is, at present, no programs will run at double speed (I think). I am told Vista will change that. I have a Duo-core laptop and not really impressed with duo-core. I think I may have been better off for performance sake to buy a single CPU of equal speed to the double duo-core total. Bazza

    ===

     
  8. goldfish

    goldfish Lt. Sushi.DC

    From what I can tell the dual core use is implemented partially at the chip level - and so it will act as a single CPU and automatically balance processor time over the two cores.

    As for clock speeds, both cores work at the full frequency allowing you to perform two operations simultaneously at 2GHz. The limitations are, however, in the balancing which obviously cannot preempt instructions any more than a single core can. This is where software based balancing comes into place, and I believe that the chipset supports SMP instructions to keep applications seperated. This is what the Affinity in the Task Manager is for. If this is set to neutral, all balancing will be done at chip level, with instructions being dynamically allocated depending on what application they came from. If you set an affinity, if the chipset has an open choice (i.e. both cores are free for that instruction) then it will choose the one which you specify. Otherwise it will choose either randomly or through some special method that Intel might have implemented to gauge readiness (which hasn't been release to any third party). My guess is that it'll choose the core which is has fastest access to that applications data - but you can't be sure.

    The same chipset that controls balancing also feeds data to SpeedStep in laptops, which works out if an application needs more power - in which case it will kick up the clock speed a notch.

    Programs do not need SMP support to use both cores - as the OS will abstract that for non SMP supporting programs. Though since the OS doesn't know the nature of the program it can't fully optimise processor usage. For example, a video editing app might be able to use both cores to process two components of video but unless the application uses SMP to send work to each core individually, the OS will allocate time as it thinks it should which might mean that both components are running on both at the same time, causing considerable swapping and shifting of data - slowing processing quite a lot.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Duo
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
     
  9. lionrampant

    lionrampant Specialist

    If I run a virus scan all of the other apps sloooow down. Will a dual core processor effortlessly run the virus scan, so that everything else is uanaffected?
     
  10. tunered

    tunered MajorGeek

    I personally believe it will be a long time before the software will be abundant enough to get the most out of dual cores. ed
     
  11. goldfish

    goldfish Lt. Sushi.DC

    That's because the virus scan is using a lot of hard drive bandwidth to access the files as it scans them. Since the other apps are invariably paging to the hard drive, they will be left with slower access to the hard drive due to the activity of the virus scanner. Not to mention scanning files is a CPU intensive process which will need lots of power - often virus scanners can elevate the scanning processes priority so that the CPU speed is not a bottleneck in processing.

    There isn't much you can do about this, other than schedule the scan for a time you're not using the computer
     
  12. AMD Pro

    AMD Pro Private E-2

    This thread is about Intel, but I suggest AMD's. The clock speed don't really matter. It means how fast the work gets done. But an Intel gets very little work done, where the AMD Dual-Cores have 2 cores doing a job so it can do more work than Intel
     
  13. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    Intel Duo Core also has two CPU cores.


    Go on give me the proof of what you say over just words on how Intels get very little work done?
     
  14. AMD Pro

    AMD Pro Private E-2

    well for example, if 2 children gets a math page, the 1st child gets it done in 1 min, and the 2nd child gets it in 3. You think the 1st child is faster, but what if the first child have 10 problems and the sencond child 100 problems? Just an example.
     
  15. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

  16. Rikky

    Rikky Wile E. Coyote - One of a kind

    Then theres something wrong with your cpu benchmark :D
     
  17. AMD Pro

    AMD Pro Private E-2

    Ok here! For example, in 3.6mhz(Intel) clock speed can finish reading 1 file in one cycle, but the 2.6mhz(AMD) clock speed can finish reading 100 files in one cycle. So even if the clock speed is faster, it does less work in a cycle
     

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