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Dual Cores Taken for a Spin in Multitasking

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the burn-up-testing dept.

Vigile writes "While dual cores are just now starting to hit the scene from processor vendors, PC Perspective has taken the first offering from Intel, the Extreme Edition 840, through the paces in single- and multi-tasking environments. It seems that those two cores can make quite a difference if you have as many applications open and working as the author does in the test." It's worth noting that each scenario consists of only desktop applications, and it'd still be interesting to see some common server benchmarks, such as a database or web server.

7 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Newsflash... by jawtheshark · · Score: 5, Funny
    SMP system performs better when applications are multithreaded...

    (Dual core is the same as an SMP system, except the cores can communicate a bit faster with each other)

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  2. Well? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this mean my Windows XP machine wont pause when I put in a floppy or Cdrom? Wow, sign me up.

    1. Re:Well? by EpsCylonB · · Score: 4, Funny

      no but it will make your internet faster.

    2. Re:Well? by MattHaffner · · Score: 2, Funny

      Internets, you mean. Multi-core and all...

    3. Re:Well? by kabocox · · Score: 2, Funny

      Does this mean my Windows XP machine wont pause when I put in a floppy or Cdrom? Wow, sign me up.

      Nope, that feature isn't scheduled until after we have 16 cores on chip, 32 Gb of RAM, 10 Terabytes of HD storage, and optical media is at 1 Terabyte per disc. They said it was a wierd hardware limit and it would require at least that much processing power for Windows XP to read a floppy or CDROM and do anything else. You don't even want to know what it will take for Longhorn to do that.

  3. Will my Spyware support these? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Or do I have to wait for Service Pack 3?

    Yours,

    Gator Fan.

  4. Re:How 'bout some Adobe CS benchmarks? by Jameth · · Score: 3, Funny

    You're dead on accurate with that one. I want a benchmark that will tell me what kind of performance I can expect if I have a logo I am editing in Illustrator that I open in Photoshop to clean up a bit and then insert into a document in InDesign while I'm trying to make it look similar in the webpage I'm putting together in TextPad, viewing both final documents through Acrobat, IE, FireFox, and Safari, all at the same time. (While listening to music.)

    And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Although I rarely do all of that at once, it has been known to happen. And don't even get me started about what happens when I have something compiling behind all of that. I'm just thankful, in a way, that since I don't do 3D work I'm not tossing Maya into that mix.