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C'mon now, you can do better than that. Your own definition refutes your arguments. A fad implies a brief period of time. Yes, all those things were popular at their release, but they are all STILL AROUND. That means they aren't fads, they are lasting products. We will see the same thing with multi-core.

To put i it in perspective, look at cars. Are airbags a fad? how about fuel-injection or anti-lock brakes? Same concept.

C'mon now, you can do better than that. Your own definition refutes your arguments. A fad implies a brief period of time. Yes, all those things were popular at their release, but they are all STILL AROUND. That means they aren't fads, they are lasting products. We will see the same thing with multi-core.

To put i it in perspective, look at cars. Are airbags a fad? how about fuel-injection or anti-lock brakes? Same concept.

Taking old technology for granite is called "progress".
Don't expect dual core to go away, ever. Intel already has 45nm processors with 4 cores coming out next year.

joefriday; Calling it a fad would indicate to me that you feel that multicore technology will eventualy disappear. This seems counter to the current and past trends amoung the hardware industry.

The trouble is its a chicken and egg sort of thing for the industry. Which do you bring to market first software or hardware? Trouble is you need both to achieve real success.

With greater power comes greater uses for the PC, perhaps in a few years people will actually use their computers for uses beyond surfing, e-mail and playing mp3's. You can do all of those things on a mianstream rig because we all didn't say; "were fine now" when we got ou 286's.

Multicore is here to stay and it will begin to spread to things like GPUs next since SLI is a cost effective, quick and very profitable way to bring mulicore like performance to the video subsystem. If you want to identify a fad then here it is...SLI.

a fad does not have to go away to be a fad, it simply has to be "a craze" for a while. Look at the definition.

To Russki: You are a moron.

So by that line of thinking, everything that was ever popular is a fad?

joefriday: first off, let me congratulate you on your measured response without resorting to insult. That serves as a great indication of your maturity level and intellect. I hope you can sense the sarcasm.

If you care to disagree, please make an argument.

Second of all, fad does imply "short lived" and something that eventually "vanishes" So, as the three posters before me said, give a better example. If anything, your example would indicate that FX-57 is a fad, not multi core.

There was no radical technology advancement between those processors.

Try to use logic in your posts, no matter how difficult it seems.

baseline: I would argue hardware. There was no SSE before Pentiums implemented then, nor were there 3DNow capable pieces of software before Athlons...

Even more basic, no MSDOS before PC in general, although people would argue that DOS was a rip-off of some of Unix and some of [that other OS whose name totally escapes me at the moment]...

That's the problem with 64bit - even though it could be exploited in software, the fact that 64 bit hardware is not widespread enough has prevented 64 bit software from being developed. It was most amazing - Win 64 was announced almost simultaneously with 64 bit Intels, even though AMD had had 64 bit for a while...

What an interesting discussion.

I think it is too early to tell whether dual cores will be a "fad" for mainstream home desktops. There are some definite performance increases with well written programs, and there are already many programs in the scientific and artistic (including holywood), and increasingly gaming communities which take advantage of the dual cores.
But, money rules the world. If you look around, there are a lot of cheap-o computer's flying off the shelves, which seem to be moving backwards in time: Celeron 2.6 GHz, 60 Gig HD's, 256-512 MB of RAM. And didn't THG have a news blurb recently that laptops accounted for 50% of sales? You can bet that very few of those will be moving dual core for a while as mobility, power savings, and price compete. Also, take a look at these mobile devices that are all the rage. As was mentioned in another post, you can do a lot nowadays with a Treo, or any number of phones. If people can do their email, IM, browsing, music, video, and probably increasingly more word processing with these devices, they'll stop buying desktops. And for games they have the consoles (which have become multi-core already).
My point is, some segments of the market will continue to drive performance and innovatain, as they always have. Business workstations and servers aren't going anywhere soon. However, if the bulk of the market shifts and it becomes unprofitable to make the high end stuff, it will get more expensive and eventually disappear. The real question is are HOME desktops becoming a fad?

Single cores are dead... that being said, you wont be able to buy single core cpu's. Next year quad cores and higher will be here from Intel and Amd.

I will gladly take you to task on your first response. You directly responded to my first post, stating that I did not know the meaning of "high-end". Obviously you did not actually read all of my posts, or you did not care to understand the conveyed meaning.

Here, let me lay it out for you: I UNDERSTAND PERFORMANCE. I HAVE TWEAKED MORE SYSTEMS THAN MOST. I APPRECIATE HIGH END RIGS AS MUCH AS THE NEXT PERSON. There. Now you can stop with your crappy "try running photoshop on that" response. My previous rigs would eat up and spit out photoshop. Try converting 18 hours of high quality mpeg2 to home-theater quality divx.

Since your previous post lacked any real sign of understanding, I gave you an appropriate response: you are a moron. It was much easier to type that than to post this message where I must re-explain the meaning of a post that most found to be clear, just so you could understand.

Now that you've made some intellignet repsonses, I must say that you are not a moron. See, it would have been much easier for the both of us if you would have just given a decent arguement the first time around, instead of just insulting my level of insight and ability.

Now that we are back to the task at hand, let me once again reiterate my stance. I see some people are thinking that I believe the technology of dual core itself is the fad. Although the author of this thread thought of it that way, I do not. I beileve, as you all, that dual core and multi core processors will be the trend of the future. What I believe is a fad, as I've stated at least twice now, is the consumer response to the technology. The "fad" lies in the bandwagon, group-think mentality that has the message boards in a fervor. People aren't cool ( 8) ) unless they go with an opteron or an x2. Look at most of the recommended system builds in the homebuilt section. In almost every one of the threads, somebody recommends a dual core. Doesn't matter what the hell the author of the thread actually wants to do with the computer, somebody is gonna post a comment to go with a dual core. Sometimes it makes sense, but other times it's just pure bandwagon propaganda being spewed out by someone that's been taken up by the $hit-storm of media publicity.

Reader's Digest condensed version: What I think is "fad" are people buying multicore cpus for the sake of saying "Hey, I own a multicore cpu!". Just like it was back in the days of Pentium, MMX, and HT technology.

Multi core trends are the future of computing, mainly because the marketers at intel and AMD say so. This is unfortunate because single cores have 2 distinct advantages over dual and multi cores.

1) Price
2) Power consumption.

Using current technology (and WELL on into the future) manufacturers build single core processors cheaper than multi cores. At the present time MANY applications run at excellent speeds using current CPU clock speeds. Many of those don't even need current generation CPU clock speeds to function well. (I'm talking here about Word, Excel, Firefox, ect.) There is a host of users that will probably end up paying more for a dual or multi core that will give them minimal gains in system performance.
Intel has the right idea with creating CPU's that use less power and do more per clock cycle. Dual and multicore CPU's all but promise increase power usage... bad news for the laptops already short battery life. A single core is a better pick here.

I'm not saying dual and multi cores don't have their place. As soon as they become more prevalent in gaming, I'll be on the bandwagon. I do hope that single core CPUs will maintain a prevalent product line. At least until multicore CPU's become cheaper and more energy efficient. I guess that is an eventual possiblity, but it's a long time coming.

i would feel that this rapid increase in performance will introduce more bloatware than not.

Multi-core CPUs are the future simply because for the most part current technology has sort of "hit a brick wall".

We simply cannot push the core clock much higher than we already have using current technology.

So it makes a lot of sense to "build out" i.e. add more cores to improve performance.

The key is getting 2, 4 or more cores into one package with each core having more parallel execution units so it can perform more operations per clock cycle.

Another great way to improve performance would be to speed up access to main memory using a faster BUS or OMC - not necessarily faster frequency wise - making it wider would actually provide better performance.

Virtually all CPUs on the market today are memory starved.

joefriday: do you ever consider that maybe you misunderstood my post?!

Although, I have to admit, I do sense your distaste of dual core CPUs in your posts (and not just in this thread). And yes, I can appreciate the relativity of "high end," and I was just acknowledging that what you referred to as "high end" would not be considered such from the standpoint of the average reader on these forums, let alone for the purposes of this thread, obviously targeted at the early adopter / enthusiast.

I would also disagree with your assessment of what is going on out there with regard to people purchasing dual core CPUs. I don't think it is just a group-think type reaction of the crowds. I think that, with the advancement in the processor technology, the average life of a PC has increased dramatically from what was common 10 years back, when clock rates were doubling every 6 months and there were plenty of applicatio