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TekSpek 's
Cores
Date issued:
Where's the benefit?
Time for the big question. In a face-off between dual-
and single-core processors, which is better? Right now, in terms
of clock speed, single-core processors have the edge. But if you've
got two cores at your disposal, won't that claw back a performance
lead? It depends on what you're doing.
Right now, it's hard to find an application that will use two cores simultaneously. There are some out there, but the majority of programs will tie themselves down to a single processor. This includes games. So, in terms of gaming performance, you'll only get the use of one core. However, let us not forget that we're left with a second core doing nothing. So, if you've always fancied encoding your DVD collection to hard disk, you can do it while you're playing a game and in theory not notice a performance drop. You could also argue that the benefit of dual cores means that anything running in the background while you're playing a game (virus scanner, firewall, other utilities...) won't have as big an impact on game performance.
Change the angle from gaming to multitasking. If you have various applications crunching away throughout the day, you'll find they're more responsive with dual-core compared to single-core. Similarly, the multimedia maniac is likely to benefit from dual-core more than the gamer.
In a year or so, when more programmers and subsequently more applications embrace parallelism, we'll see single applications benefiting from dual-core processors. Until then, gamers should probably stick to a speedy single-core chip.
