Dual Core Confused

[atp777]

I haven't been following the hardware market since the Voodoo & 3dfx went out... but since I've visited this beautiful site I've been reading non-stop for about 2 weeks.

So with all the recent events I'm a little confused. When a dual core's speed is rated at lets say 1.83GHz, is that the speed of each core or the whole die?

Sorry for my lack of knowledge.

 

[voxel]

When a dual core's speed is rated at lets say 1.83GHz, is that the speed of each core or the whole die?.

Each core. Amazing isn't it? Two CPUs in ONE! Next year you'll see four in one.

However, graphics card makers have yet to catch up to the grandfather of graphics, SGI, and only have two GPUs operating together.

 

[NEO3]

The speed is related to each core, since there is nothing as an inverted Hyperthread, to add the power of the 2 in 1.

 

[hcforde]

WAS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU?

Everybody seems to have their take on what it is. Take a look at the AMD 3800+ just for an example,

*a single core cpu runs at a multiplier of 10 and a fsb of 200
*in a dual core, each core runs at a multiplier of 9 and a fsb of 200
(this is just an example of how it works, I did not look up the exact multiplies and fsb(front side bus) settings.

There is a Mhz/Ghz issue in that with the technology of AMD they felt that the speed a CPU was running at was not the whole story so they started this rating system to show that they could have a similar computing end effect but run at a slower speed.

IN the beginning games did not take advantage of dual cores so it was better to buy a single core at the same speed over a dual core of the same rating, it had more brute strength. In general applications the second core can take up the slack when the first core gets bogged down. Dual core like dual CPU allows to different applications to run on their own core. If one goes down there is no effect on the other. now you can burn a dvd and play a game both at the fastest times that that core will allow. In applications that are dual CPU aware both cores operate simultaneously without waiting for the application to be bogged down.

I hope this helps

 

[atp777]

Thanks a lot guys. I admit it was quite a dumb question but I honestly had no idea how it was measured. Now to get rid of this P4 and get a C2D or X2... but then I just saw Toms article on the $720 Gaming system using the PD805 OC'ed @ 4.1 I'll just have to remind myself to turn it off to keep my electric bill below $100 a month.

 

[RichPLS]

Then you want to look at the 920 then, since it overclocks as well as the 805, but runs much cooler and has been revised making better performance.

 

[SidVicious]

Your current motherboard won't support any dual core CPUs so your upgrade path is rather limited unless you replace it.

Depending on your budget, an Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 paired up with an X2 3800+ would allow you to migrate your current memory and GPU while giving you an upgrade path to a PCI-E GPU and AM2 CPUs down the road.

Obviously, this won't be a C2D killer but those 267$ will buy you a lot of headroom.