advantages of dual core?

astroworpastroworp Northridge, CA
edited April 2004 in Hardware
hey guys. i'm basically just wondering what dual core technology is all about, and what the advantages of it are? i don't really know anything about it so i thought i would see if any of you do?

Comments

  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    It's just like havng Dual Processors, unlike Hyperthreading that Intel does, this is true Dual Processing power.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited April 2004
    keep in mind that these new dual core opterons are supposed to be completely pin compatible with existing opteron motherboards (im basing this on a news post i found on [H] which i cant access right now). so the advantage would be A) space saving, B) true dual processing in one chip and C) amazing upgradability on current setups
  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    What about heat?
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    They will run hotter, natively, than single core CPUs. They also may want alower voltage and more amperage on that lower voltage. So, BIOS and board itself as far as revision and model should support what you plan to use for a CPU.

    BTW, Prescott in recent versions is true dual core also, Northwood HT is dual core with smaller caching than Prescott, and Prescott has bigger caches than Opteron right now and needs them for the way it works-- fro gaming, I would say an Opteron over Prescott, for other things whichever is cheaper for true GHz. Hyperthreading allows for dynamic switching and balancing of pipe load, still two pipes in Prescott-- it is not a substitiute, HT is a load balancing strategy and a pipe choice strategy combined with the ability in 64 Bit O\Ss to feed thread segments independently of pipe ID. Prescott feeds calcs to least in use pipe, rather than forcing two threads to merge into one physical pipe-- but if one pipe gets clogged it can use other pipe for things that are stuck waiting and have been queued longer than newer requssts for CPU time slices.

    Note, if you want multiple CPU sockets plus multiple core per socket, Xeons now are available in HT dual core also. As are Sledgehammer grade AMDs that have more cores per CPU than Prescott or Current Xeons-- these are 400 and 800 series Opterons or variants on them with line names set to distinguish them as distinct line within the Opteron\Sledgehammer class, though I have not seen many 800 series offered yet on normal market here in US.
  • SputnikSputnik Worcester, MA
    edited April 2004
    if you have more questions on this type of topic, take a look over at http://2cpu.com, they're wonderful at this (and good folding folks to boot).

    basically having 2 cpus on the same die, like all the other guys said. the Power4/5s have been doing this for a while now, same with alot of the sparc chips that everyone and their brother makes. Both cores are usually completley independent of each other and just happen to share the same package (thus reducing cost).

    also www.ars-technica.com has some really good stuff on SMP (symetric multiprocessing) and SMT (hyperthreading aka symetric multithreading)
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited April 2004
    By the time this comes around they will be on 90nm processing for sure. Hopefully reducing heat and power requirements of the current chips. So maybe they will require the same specs from the motherboard.
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