The future is Dual Core baby!

Last month, rival chip makes Intel and AMD made official that they were releasing dual-core chip soons.

So whats the deal with dual-core? How will it affect me the end user; the gaming user, the blogging user, the chatting user? Is it worth the time to drool in anticipation of the next computer system we get that is dual-core?

Well, before we get to that, what the flying chapati is this dual-core? Quite simply:

Dual-core is the technology by which two cores (that is, two instances of the instruction execution parts of the processor) reside on the same siliconchip

Ok, you probably got lost at the instruction execution part as i did, so i got ya a link to read up on that. Didnt you always wanted to know what goes on in that little chip?

So why even build dual-core? Why not just build a chip that fits more stuff and make it faster? Heck, just build a bigger, or wider or fatter or whatever?

The thing is, certain factors need to be considered:

• power consumption
• the level of heat produced

No doubt, we've made huge advances in chip technology, making it faster with comparitively less heat generated. But there is a limit to everything, and current chip technology has nearly reached. To build denser chips, will result in higher power consumption. Higher power consumption means --> more electricity going through --> and more electricity going through means --> MORE HEAT is generated.

To go further ahead will result in chips that are super fast...but SUPER SUPER HOT. You would need to buy specially designed casings with built-in freezers to keep the chips cold.
The solution = dual core.

Do check out this article on Hardware Analysis, that does some interesting tests on single core vs dual core Intels. The results are pretty amazing, but the bottom line is:

• for SINGLE application performance, running a single core chip is good enough. a Dual Core chip has only a very very minimal performance increase in this scenario
• for HEAVY multi-tasking scenarios (eg running outlook + adobe photoshop + Quake III simultaneously) is when you will see and feel the difference. The response rates are amazing in a dual core system.
  

The bottom line is, that we're still going to see faster processing speeds, and the heat produced is still manageable. Good a reason as any to get drunk this weekend. whoopee!