Dual Cores Taken for a Spin in Multitasking

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.

Comments

Well...

[X0563511]

I'm still bumming around with a sub-gigahertz chip, specifically an Athlon T-Bird. I've been out of the loop for too long, can anyone tell me the benifits of using a dual core system (and while we are at it, a 64-bit chip)? Any problems to look out for if I decide to jump on the wagon in my next upgrade?

Something missing

[FidelCatsro]

What this test really was missing was a direct comparison to SMP systems which really for me makes the results entierly boring and expected .
If he had shoved in a duel opteron set-up and a duel xeon set-up then it may have been a little more intresting , though as it stands its like stating the obvious.

One thought I had...

[Kjella]

...and I'm not quite sure if it's a good one, but for desktops:

The foreground program has a dedicated core. If you switch programs, put the old on the "other" core. The new moved from the "other" core. Essentially, your current program has full responsiveness (assuming you don't do things that lock up the application itself), no context switches, no other programs that can run some weird blocking call (on a single core machine, it certainly looks that way at least, especially CD-ROM operations).

Granted you could end up with your fg processor being idle most of the time. But the way many people work with the computer, the foreground program is the ONLY time-critical application.

Kjella