For years, I wanted a dual processor machine. Work had them and they are very cool. Instead of contain one block to do all the thinking, they had two. It’s not twice as fast, since they need to communicate with one another but it has other advantages. They don’t age so quickly. I saw dual CPU 10 year old computers still in use, where the single CPUs had been removed years ago. Even a 2 yr old dual Xeon wouldn’t be too bad as a personal computer. The biggest thing you notice is responsiveness. When a request for work hits a CPU it is executed or waits. With two cores there’s less chance it will wait. Responsiveness, means that when one window is crashing and trying to slow the whole machine to a crawl the computer will still respond instead of locking up.
Now, that I waxed loquacious over dual processor machines what is a dual core machine? It’s simple. Inside the one block there are really two CPUs. And they are communicating across the nanometers not inches like in a dual processor machine. CPU chips have shrunk much like everything. Remember how big hearing aids used to be? But the physical chip is the same size or even twice as big. One company, AMD, decided to take advantage of this and throw in an extra CPU. Intel has joined the market in earnest and most or all the machines this Chrismas will be dual core.
I got my dual core last Christmas and it’s been fantastic. Converting movies for TiVo used to take as long to watch the movie. Now it takes 15 minutes. I can assign one CPU to play a movie and the other to play a game. Everyone has seem moment where the computer get really slow doing something mysteriously important to it. With dual core computers, this is very rare. One CPU would handle it and the other would listen to the user.
Recently, priced on these chips have been cut in half by a fight between Intel and AMD. My chip which was $320 at 12/05 is now $150 on 7/6. For the cost of a motherboard and chip, roughly $225 with shipping you could double the speed of your existing computer.