About Intel and AMD Dual Core Processors
Clock speeds have been rising inexorably over the last few years
and it's usually accepted that the average home PC today has more
power than all of NASA had in the sixties. Great, but is it enough?
Intel and AMD are constantly battling in a GHz war to push processor
speeds faster and faster. Why? There are arguments that most users
don't make use of even 10% of their machine's capability. Surely, it
makes sense to call a halt now and let users catch up with the
technology? Isn't developing and launching even faster processors a
complete waste of time?
More on dual processors and how
they differ from dual core.
Business users, server admins and others will hotly deny that
there's no need for more power. Others, like gamers and PC
enthusiasts, would agree with them, as would graphics designers, video
editors and other heavy users of CPU power. Why then do home PC users
need to bother about these advances?
Here's why: Software has a habit of catching up with hardware and
using all the available power. New applications for the home PC
market, and new versions of older applications for this market will
eventually demand more power and the home user doesn't have much of a
choice but to go with the flow. The level of PC technology from the
mid-nineties is more than enough to run a word processing application
and an email client but trying buying an AMD K6-500 processor and a 16
MB graphics card - they just don't make them anymore.
Moore's Law
The famous Moore's law which predicted that the number of
transistors on a processor would double every eighteen months has held
true for a surprising length of time. However, it won't hold forever.
Shrinking transistors can go only so far and no further. We've heard
about the 120 nanometer CPU fabs and then the 90 nm fabs. But standard
physical laws tend to not hold for really, really small devices. Theoretically, you can go down to a layer one atom thick... but where
do you go from there? You simple can't construct a layer of any
material that is less than one atom thick. In fact, even at a few
atoms in thickness you reach various restrictions. (Related: Single
Electron Tunneling transistors)
There is the option of
quantum computing but we are still a while
away from a working quantum computer.
Dual Processors
The only other option is to stick more processors into the PC.
This has been done for over a decade via the now Xeon range of Intel
CPUs (more on the Xeon) and the recent AMD
Opteron processors (more on the Opteron)
- and their older AMD MP processors.
Dual processor machines tended to be huge, expensive and not something
you'd find in the average home. That's going to change.
 
Dual core
Standard CPUs from both Intel and AMD are going to be dual
processor machines in all but name. Both manufacturers are moving
towards building two processor cores into one CPU block.
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2: Why dual core
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