Multi-Core Processor Evolution

You might be amazed with all the new processors that are now available in the market.This article aims to help average computer users to understand better the multi-core processor revolution. Understanding what the different multi-core processor is can help you decide which processor to get if you want to make your computer run faster, have an upgrade or just want to know what a core does in the first place.

A Processor or Central Processing Units or also known as CPU is the brain of your computer. It handles everything that needs to be processed in your computer except for video processing. That makes the CPU a very important part of your computer system. The faster your CPU can process the data, the faster your system responds and the less time you need to wait for a command or task to be finished.

As time goes by, CPU manufacturers started making faster CPUs. Most of them failed and only Intel and AMD survived that tough competition. For a decade, Intel and AMD improved their silicon to go faster and faster until around 2004. The current technology limits the CPUs to go above 4 GHz (GHz is a measure of CPU speed to process information). Currently attempting to break the 4 GHz is not possible. According to Moore's Law, computing is increasing or improving exponentially approximately every 2 years. But the engineering limitations of the CPUs that time has been reached so they need to come up ways to improve it and there was no choice but to increase the number of cores in the CPU.

The logic behind can be compare to a car that twice the number of "cylinders" should produce twice the "speed." but it didn't really work out that way. They placed a 3 GHz core and fit it next to another 3 GHz core but that didn't process like a 6 GHz core at all. That's because the second core needs specific software to process at the same time. The computer get confused when it process data from the two cores. The first data should be processed first before the other. It's like a single cashier register queue. If the cashier tries to process two customers at once it will get confused. Same with the computer it will get confused and process nothing at all.

It turned out that the new processor doesn't need to process a single data using two cores simultaneously. There are less than 1% of all popular software applications that needs to more than 3 GHz speeds. For example, Adobe Photoshop can perform really fast on a 3 GHz per side dual core. Photoshop performs like it was using a 6 GHz single core. Even though that there are software and games that don't recognize the CPU's second core and kept plugging along at normal speed. Operating Systems (OS) such as Windows XP and Vista can slough off some of their own OS functions to one of it's CPU cores so that the other core can be dedicated to applications that are not "multi-threaded" like the Photoshop. Users who have tried dual core CPU have noticed a serious increase in speed when tried it. To make it short dual core CPU performs by allotting one of its core to be dedicated to only running the application and the other core will run all the background functions. So if you want to enjoy a faster and happier computing experience you should not buy another single core CPU again especially if you are fond of multi tasking when you are using your computer.

Aside from dual core, quad core processors are becoming more popular in the market today. A quad core is double a dual core that means that it can process four streams at once. This is really a very processing speed especially for very rare "multi-threaded" applications but for regular users, it would be hard to tell the performance difference between a dual core and a quad core processor. People who use "multi-threaded" application or future application that will take advantage of multiple cores in the future will surely enjoy using one of these babies. When you buy a quad core today you are securing yourself from any future developments that will take advantage of multiple core processors making your computer system from being obsolete.