Dual-core Systems Necessary for Business Users?

Lam1969 writes "Hygeia CIO Rod Hamilton doubts that most business users really need dual-core processors: 'Though we are getting a couple to try out, the need to acquire this new technology for legitimate business purposes is grey at best. The lower power consumption which improves battery life is persuasive for regular travelers, but for the average user there seems no need to make the change. In fact, with the steady increase in browser based applications it might even be possible to argue that prevailing technology is excessive.' Alex Scoble disagrees: 'Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services, background processes and other apps running at once. Are they worth it at $1000? No, but when you have a choice to get a single core CPU at $250 or a slightly slower multi-core CPU for the same price, you are better off getting the multi-core system and that's where we are in the marketplace right now.' An old timer chimes in: 'I can still remember arguing with a sales person that the standard 20 Mg hardrive offered plenty of capacity and the 40 Mg option was only for people too lazy to clean up their systems now and then. The feeling of smug satisfaction lasted perhaps a week.'"

Comments

You've got more threads than you might think...

[gbulmash]

The key quote here, IMO, is: "Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services, background processes and other apps running at once."

All the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-exploit, DRM, IM clients, mail clients, multimedia "helper" apps, browser "helper" apps, little system tray goodies, etc., etc., and so on, it can start to add up. A lot of home and small business users are running a lot more background and simultaneous stuff than they may realize.

That's not to say these noticeably slow down a 3.2GHz single-core machine with a gig of RAM, but the amount of stuff running in the backgrownd is growing exponentially. Dual core may not be of much benefit to business users now, but how long will that last?

- Greg

1996 Called

[wideBlueSkies]

It wants to know why we need pentiums on the desktop. Why isn't a 486 DX fast enough?

wbs.

Most folks DON'T need much HDD space...

[Loopy]

Really, consider the average business PC user. Outside of folks that have large development environments, do video/graphics/audio work, work on large software projects (such as games) really do not need 80GB hard disks. If you DO need more than that, you probably are quickly getting to the point of being able to justify storing your data on a file server. My unit at work only has 30GB on it, and that includes several ghost images of the systems I'm running QA on. Sure, grouse about Microsoft code bloat all you want but it doesn't take up THAT much HDD space.

Sweeping generalizations are rarely more than "Yeah, me too!" posts. /rolleyes

Re:Memory bound, not CPU bound ...

[swillden]

I'm a software developer [...] I'm almost never CPU bound if I have enough memory.

Don't compile much, huh? I'd love to have dual cores -- "make -j3", baby!