Quad Core

[rossoneri]

Can someone explain to me about quad core, im abit confused.

Im not sure how it works.

[koster]

If you're buying a new computer then which processor it has it an important consideration. A quad core processor is better than a dual core one.

With a quad core processor your computer will be able to do more tasks simultaneously, resulting in better performance.

[beso]

A Qaud core has four processors on the CPU chip. It can run multiple applications by distributing them across the processors. An single processor has to interleave instructions from different tasks.

If you only run one application at a time a quad processor won't go any faster than a dual.

[fo3nix]

Most computers used to have one 'CPU' inside them, that did all the processing work, and was the brains of the PC.

For years, manufacturers like Intel could just add more stuff into the CPU and make it run faster --- from 1 GHz to 2 GHz etc., so that everything magically runs faster.

A few years ago, technical issues (not reaching the entire chip in one clock cycle and heat issues), stopped this magic from being possible as easily. So, manufacturers like Intel started putting two 'cores' on one chip.

So instead of having one brain on one physical microchip, they now have two brains on the one chip. This is called dual core.

If you put four brains on one chip, this is quad core. And you can go up and up, in time.

But this doesn't automatically make things faster.

It takes nine months for a woman to have a baby. But you can't knock up nine women and have a baby in one month. Some problems naturally can be 'parallelised', and some can't.

The problem is that all computer programming techniques have been based with one brain at a time. Changing programs to work with more than one is a lot of work.

Currently, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc., all work well with one core, and in some ways can take advantage of more than one core. But not all that well.

So really, you won't notice much of a difference now between dual core and quad core.

But in a few years, if you upgrade the software, you might. So if the choice is between quad core and dual core, go for quad core.

[rossoneri]

Oh ok makes sense now thanks alot everyone.

Just one more question if i had quad core such as 4x 2.40 GHz which makes 9.6 GHz that dosent mean im getting that much power from it?

[fo3nix]

No, as I said above, getting 9 girls knocked up doesn't give you a baby in one month.

If all the code is written to work across all those processors, then yes. But right now, Windows isn't. None of the mainstream OSs are.