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

Re:Newsflash...

[CastrTroy]

And again unfortunately, the only way to get good performance out of those designs is by explicitly coding for parallel processing. And that's hard for humans.

I took a Parallel programming course in university. It was hard. Most students didn't get it. I got an A+ in the course. The hard part is that you really have to forget everything you have learned about programming on a single processor. You have to use completely different algorithms. All the regular algorithms follow a straight line. Parallel processing doesn't work this way. For most applications it's more trouble than it's worth. But for those complicated problems that really need it, it can be worth it. It will probably remain away from the common desktop for a long time to come. But it does have its uses.