I’m a non-computer person. How does a dual core processor compare to a single core in terms of speed, power, etc.?
If a single core is a two lane two way road then a dual core is like two two lane two way road.
(hee hee makes less sense the more i read it, but it works)
It is the same speed, but since there are multiple processors, it could run up to twice as fast, at least in theory. This is because most computers have multiple processes running at once. In reality, it is somewhat slower, since the CPU is not the only performance bottleneck. At some point, all processes will need to access the I/O and graphics subsystems, as well as memory.
From Wikipedia’s article on multiple processors:
“The amount of performance gained by the use of a multicore processor depends on the problem being solved and the algorithms used, as well as their implementation in software (Amdahl’s law). For so-called “embarrassingly parallel” problems, a dual-core processor with two cores at 2GHz may perform very nearly as fast as a single core of 4GHz.[1] Other problems though may not yield so much speedup. This all assumes however that the software has been designed to take advantage of available parallelism. If it hasn’t, there will not be any speedup at all. However, the processor will multitask better since it can run two programs at once, one on each core.”
See: Multi-core