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Dual-core Athlon 64 X2 Laptop Reviewed
Steve from Hexus writes "Dual core finds its way inside a laptop (albeit a not-so-portable DTR) in the form of Rockdirect's Xtreme64. The DTR features an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, two 7200rpm hard drives and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra GPU. HEXUS.net has a review of the laptop, one of the most powerful we've seen hit the market to date." From the article: "Rather than change a formula that works, Rockdirect has opted to stick with the Clevo D900-based chassis that its other performance-based laptops use. The obvious downsides are bulkiness and weight, with the laptop sitting almost 5cm high and weighing in at 5.7kg. It's a desktop replacement in the truest sense of the words, and with an 8kg travel weight (including charger and supplied carrying case) and relatively poor battery life, it's about as portable as a concrete slab."
Yeah, the system has two cores in it, but the term dual-core really means a single chip with two processor cores on it, connected via something (the cache, the on-chip arbiter or whatever) and then attaching to the rest of the system via a single interface.
AMD's processors are dual-core as they connect via an on-chip arbiter, the SRQ. They then connect to the rest of the system via a HyperTransport link. AMD's next core revision, the F-Step, will have 4 core connections from the SRQ, allowing for future quad-core processors.
Intel's current 'dual-core' processors aren't really dual-core as they connect to the FSB independently. Indeed Intel's latest Presler processors have separate dies on the processor packaging. In practice however it doesn't really matter that much, so they get away with calling it 'dual-core' when it is technically SMP on a chip. Yonah will be Intel's first true dual-core processor because the cores are connected at the L2 cache level, which they share.
So now people defined the number of cores a processor has by the number of cores per socket in the system. In your system you have one core per socket, so the processors are single core, the system is dual-processor. In the reviewed laptop there are two cores in one socket, for the system is single-processor, but the processor is dual-core. Quite simple really.