Foo - Single core or dual core CPU's?

I'm looking to build myself a new work station, when alls said and done, I'm probably gonna spend about $1000-1200. The only question I have is what processor to get, seems like there's a lot of buzz around the 'duo-core' processors recently, but their clock speeds are so low compared to what I could buy a single core for.

And from what I read, they seem to be more suited to multiple applications, wouldn't it be better to just get a good single core processor if I'm only going to be running a single (CPU intensive) application? Anyone know anything about these?

According to my friend (uber geek. He is only in highschool and is working officially for Red Hat kind of geek), Dual core is where things are headed. I played with his comp, and it's like a nice bike. Dual core AMD. My next build will be dual core for sure.

Also, from my understanding, the dual core splits the load. So, one intensive operation is handled by both.

I wonder if and when the 64 bit chips wil lbe supported. I have a turion 64 in my hp laptop but no real drivers for the 64 bit xp.

And Intel is gonna be coming out with their quad-core processors sometime soon too I think. Heh, it'll be many years before I front the money for a new computer, so I don't really keep up on these kind of things.

And Intel is gonna be coming out with their quad-core processors sometime soon too I think. Heh, it'll be many years before I front the money for a new computer, so I don't really keep up on these kind of things.
this is why I go years between upgrades now.

I'd wait for the 64 core...

Dual-core all the way if you're going to be running multiple apps. Straight GHZ-to-GHZ comparison is worthless because a 1ghz AMD-64 is about 1.7x faster than a P4 1ghz. And the 1.6ghz CoreDuo is about 3x faster than a P4 1.6ghz. It really depends upon the application you're using and how well it's been programmed to take advantage of multi-threading (along with the OS). The best (fastest) OS for 64-bit computing right now are the various UNIX implementations (LINUX/OSX). Solaris has been 64-bit for quite a while now.

Straight GHZ-to-GHZ comparison is worthless because a 1ghz AMD-64 is about 1.7x faster than a P4 1ghz.
It's funny how many "kids" who consider themselves computer geeks don't get this simple concept. They don't realize that plugging a board into a backplane doesn't mean they actually understand what's going on in the scenario.

According to my friend (uber geek. He is only in highschool and is working officially for Red Hat kind of geek), Dual core is where things are headed. I played with his comp, and it's like a nice bike. Dual core AMD. My next build will be dual core for sure.

Also, from my understanding, the dual core splits the load. So, one intensive operation is handled by both.

I understand things down the road are probably gonna be all dual core, but do todays app's and OS's take advantage of the dual core?

Running Adobe Illustrator on my computer at work which has a dual core AMD 3800, I think, each core at 2.0 ghz, and that doesn't run noticably faster than running it on my comp at home thats only got an old Pentium 4 1.3ghz CPU, a slower HD, only advantage is having just little more RAM

I don't know if apps now are really optimized for dual core. I know several linux disto's have 64 bit editions out though.

Dual-core all the way if you're going to be running multiple apps. Straight GHZ-to-GHZ comparison is worthless because a 1ghz AMD-64 is about 1.7x faster than a P4 1ghz. And the 1.6ghz CoreDuo is about 3x faster than a P4 1.6ghz. It really depends upon the application you're using and how well it's been programmed to take advantage of multi-threading (along with the OS). The best (fastest) OS for 64-bit computing right now are the various UNIX implementations (LINUX/OSX). Solaris has been 64-bit for quite a while now.

I'm not running multiple apps at all, only one app, and if I could cut back the cost by not having to spend the extra dough on a dual core processor that won't do me much better than a single core, it'd be great to spend it on a better monitor.

I've read through a few things, like this (http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=5&ArticleID=461&P=4), but I'm still not sure. Oh well, gotta talk to my computer geek friend tomorrow.

I think I'm filling MERTON's shoes nicely.

I'm looking to build myself a new work station, when alls said and done, I'm probably gonna spend about $1000-1200. The only question I have is what processor to get, seems like there's a lot of buzz around the 'duo-core' processors recently, but their clock speeds are so low compared to what I could buy a single core for.

And from what I read, they seem to be more suited to multiple applications, wouldn't it be better to just get a good single core processor if I'm only going to be running a single (CPU intensive) application? Anyone know anything about these?

What OS are you going to run?

Dual-core is best for those who run demanding apps, or lots of apps at once.

Gamers will still want single-core, as you will have one really fast core, and most games are coded to run best on those.

It will be a year or two before apps amde to take advantage of dual-core become common. If you ahve the cash to spend on it, go for it.

What OS are you going to run?

XP home edition

hard-core

Hi,
if you are putting together a new computer, I would suggest getting dual core.
The reason is simple enough, over time programs demand more from computers.
So while you would be fine for a while, eventually the extra power could come in handy.

Sometime in October MS will be offering coupons for a free copy of Vista for anyone that buys a computer now. So you are covered on that angle. I suggest getting 2 megs of ram, that is the new standard. In fact, I suggest 2 megs even if it means downgrading the processor.

Now, the reason dual core speeds are so slow is simply because Intel wants to
do it's traditional product cycle. It needs this chip to last a while, so they are selling CPUs that can run a lot faster so they can keep the appearance of 'new and improved' going.

But the chip is better than the older Pentiums. It even stomps the AMD chips.
I don't know what you usually get for a computer, but the new Windows OS, Vista, will demand a fairly hot video card. The full version will have a 3D desktop
that will be very slick. They will offer dumbed down versions for the guys that get $500 computers, but I suspect once you see the new OS you will want it.

Here is a roughly $1K box if you want to DIY

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You can get a dual core Intel for around $200 from Newegg. The 1.86 Ghz is actually under $200 right now. Partly because this is so new, you might want to
spend a couple bucks more and get an Intel motherboard. Since you'll want 2 gigs, get one that can handle either 667 or 800 ram, and use the 667 for now.
The difference is so small you will prob never upgrade the ram, but at least the possibility is there. If money is not tight, get a board that supports 1066/800 and get the 800.

If you are a planning on buying a whole box.... I think your priority should be that 2 gigs and a 7000 series Nvidia card. That will keep things humming and you can get a faster CPU later when the prices have dropped.

I understand things down the road are probably gonna be all dual core, but do todays app's and OS's take advantage of the dual core?

Running Adobe Illustrator on my computer at work which has a dual core AMD 3800, I think, each core at 2.0 ghz, and that doesn't run noticably faster than running it on my comp at home thats only got an old Pentium 4 1.3ghz CPU, a slower HD, only advantage is having just little more RAMYour experience shows that CPU-speed is not the only criteria you want to look at in designing a system. Like a linear production-line, there are many areas that can be bottlenecks and you want to focus on the rate-limiting step:

1. memory is probably the least important as far as speed is concerned. Most systems with +266mhz bus speeds and DDR memory will move data around faster than other parts of the system and the memory will be idle most of the time waiting for the next instruction. The amount of memory is more important than the speed. Around 512mb is the minimum now as WindowsXP itself hogs up 200-300mb by itself and once you've loaded your single app, you've only got 100mb left over for the data-file, actually less due to stacks, heaps and temp. storage. Memory's cheap, get 1gb, but there's a Windows bug that makes stuff above 2gb not very effective.

2. CPU only makes a huge difference in computing-intensive tasks. Such as if you're doing 3D rendering for Pixar, running global weather analysis, crunching videos/DVDs, etc. You've probably noticed from the bar-graph in the TaskManager that the CPU is hardly ever fully maxed out on your systems.

3. video is important if you're a gamer that requires fast video at 50fps+. High-end games are the most taxing apps and require the fastest CPUs and video possible. If you're doing Illustrator tasks, all you really need is something that supports the resolutions you want to use and can scroll around the image fairly quickly. Pretty much any video-card on the market will be fine. So video's not a bottleneck in your case.

4. DISK STORAGE is becoming more and more the major speed-limitation in any system. Just booting up Windows requires over 1gb of data to be transferred off the disk. With larger and larger files and databases, the CPU and memory is usually waiting for the disk. Database, video- and web-servers sees much more significant improvements in speed with going to a faster disk than any other kind of upgrade. If you double the CPU speed, you may see a 10% improvement. But double the disk performance through large caching or RAID or solid-state disks will see close to a 100% increase in speed on these types of systems.


In your case, Illustrator is hardly a processor-intensive task as you've seen in comparing your work vs. home systems. The CPU is the biggest difference between those two computers, yet your subjective feel of speed is the same. However, Illustrator works with large files and uses multiple copies in memory for undos, so it'll use up all the available RAM to load as much of the image as possible. However, most of the image will still be on disk and needs to be swapped out and paged in as you scroll around. THIS is the area you want to focus on if you want speedy Illustrator performance, a super-fast disk. I'd recommend a minimum of a 10,000rpm SATA or SCSI drive as their command-queuing improves disk performance significantly. Even better is a RAID-0 configuration using two SATA or SCSI 15,000rpm drives.

Disk speed sucks assss.
The absolute biggest slowdown ever. You can have 2-3gb of memory but still be waiting on your hard drive to load everything into memory.

I found the motherboard is the single biggest botleneck.

A crap motherboard can often cut high-end hardware off at it's knees. I've always made it a point to NEVER buy a cut-rate motherboard. I'd rather use a crap processor, than use a cheap motherboard.

The whole single vs dual-core thing amuses me because it's really not that much different than traditional multiprocessor configurations. It's just that the cores are now on a single die. This cuts down some interprocessor latency, simplifies memory to processor interconnects and allows manufacturers to package smaller but to the user, it all really boils down to how the application and OS is written. To this day, the only OS I've seen that can really do seamless multithreading of applications is BeOS. This is a thread-initiating OS whereby the app doesn't have to be written as a threaded app but just multitasking and the OS will pre-thread for you. Solaris is also getting up there in capability... probably because Sun is trying to take advantage of their 8-core Niagara/T1 processors (each core is quad-threading). With other OSes, if your app isn't threading then you won't really take advantage of multiple cores on a per application basis. The multiple cores do help spread the load though because the OS will schedule to run multiple apps concurrently on the multiple cores.

This all brings me back to when people were going gah-gah over Crays and other like super-parallel computers. Yes, they ran fast but if you didn't vectorise/parallelise your code, a Y-MP was a dog compared to a uniprocessor 486 machine.

I found the motherboard is the single biggest botleneck.

A crap motherboard can often cut high-end hardware off at it's knees. I've always made it a point to NEVER buy a cut-rate motherboard. I'd rather use a crap processor, than use a cheap motherboard.
+1....the real bottle neck in modern computing is the bus speed.

Like Danno said....memory is useless to get higher end because its sitting idle most of the time anyway. CPU has the same issue...waiting for data to do something. It's the slow bus that can't get data from memory to cache/cpu. You need a good motherboard with the fastest bus you can find.

The whole single vs dual-core thing amuses me because it's really not that much different than traditional multiprocessor configurations.
Actually it is quite different.
Dual core requires very little configuration or extra programming to take the most basic advantage of it. Multiple CPU however require extremely painful configurations. Even to this day people still have not figured out how to make multiple processors work for anything beyond hard core workstations. SQL Server, or Sybase or Exchange may be able take advantage of MS SQL but your average everyday applications can't and won't.

Dual core allows applications and oses to take care of it quite transparently. This is extremely noticeable when performing operations such as opening up complex applications like MS Office suite. One can even develop a simple application - such as a multi-threaded e-mail processer which will run faster on a duo core setup then it would on the same equivalent multiple processor setup.

The notice is great and the reason Duo Core is doing what multiple processors couldn't do is its being done quite transparently. Even if an application is not multi-threaded multiple applications being run can still take advantage without being told to have affinity for a specific cpu.

Actually it is quite different.
Dual core requires very little configuration or extra programming to take the most basic advantage of it. Multiple CPU however require extremely painful configurations. Even to this day people still have not figured out how to make multiple processors work for anything beyond hard core workstations. SQL Server, or Sybase or Exchange may be able take advantage of MS SQL but your average everyday applications can't and won't.
Ummm... the main reason people can't figure out how to make multiple CPUs work properly is because OSes have been designed stupidly. The hardest part is memory addressing and this is usually done at the OS level. With dual core you only have one addressing scheme to deal with. Solaris has been able to handle multi-proc situations pretty well since the early 1990s. Regardless, the application will not split cycles between the cores unless the OS can do it for them. If the application is threaded then most thread-aware OSes will be able to schedule a thread on different cores but unless you have a really smart OS, this won't happen with a single-threaded app. Dual-core makes it convenient. It doesn't necessarily (strictly speaking from a hardware level) increase performance that much over traditional multiple-proc architectures.

yeah, focusing on the hardware is only part of the issue. Programming for multiple-core CPUs isn't that much different than multiple-CPUs.

5. Operating System is what ties all that hardware together and makes your software work. Windows is always behind the competition as far as optimization for any kind of hardware. UNIX has always been king at multiple-processor kernels. It's also much more stable with a separate microkernel architecture compared to the unifed kernel of Windows (think viruses & rogue processes). In the end, if you want to use Windows, then get the 64-bit version of Windows to get the most from your latest hardware, regardless of single- or dual-core CPU. I still have an Alpha version of WinNT running around somewhere... Although Solaris or LINUX will kick its @ss anyway...

Dual-core's the way to go because you have to look at the numbers of processes and threads running at any one time. Just Windows sitting there by itself without any user apps running will have 25-35 processes. Even with a non-threaded application, having dual-core CPU will allow non-essential threads to run on the 2nd core freeing up one entire core just for your programme (providing the OS's scheduler is any good). Adobe's also gotten around Window's lack of multiple-CPU support by providing dual-CPU plug-ins. On some operations, dual-core gets close to a 100% increase in performance.

Thanks for all the replies. Yeah, a fast hard drive is on the top of my list, but I guess I gotta look more deeply into what mother board I get than just compatability and features. I want on that will support 4gb with 4 slots. I'm probably only gonna get 2gb and upgrade if needed later.

Basically what I originally wanted to know was what would be the best bang for my buck right now with my OS and software that I'm using.

For the best bang-for-the-buck, you can't beat a dual-core Pentium-D 805 that can be had for $90. You can pick up a CPU+MB for $200-300 and pump it up to 4ghz+ easily as outlined in this Tom's Hardware article (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/index.html). Check out the benchmarks, the overclocked Pentium-D 805 beats EVERY single Pentium chip in the line-up (Core2duo not tested yet) and EVERY single AMD chip except for the FX line. Your office machine's AMD-64x2 3800+ is no match and your home system's P4 is off the bottom of the chart.

So late's right on with his system-recommendation, go for the dual-core. Personally, I'd go for one of these pumped up Pentium-D 805 systems and add a fast SATA RAID system. I'd go with a minimum of a 10,000rpm disk-drive, 15,000rpm SCSI if you really want fast Illustrator, graphics or video work. If you don't have 3D-gaming requirements, you can even use the on-board video on the MB to start. Then add a video-card later for multiple screens. Here's a good CPU+MB to start with and build the rest around:

ZipZoomFly - Pentium-D 805 for $$91.90 (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=80849&prodlist=pricegrabber) or
Monarch Computers - PentiumD805 + Asus motherboard combo $192.38 (http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=M&Product_Code=80167&Category_Code=INTELC&pwselect=110940,120246,800083,800127,&AFFIL=pricewatch&NR=1)

Avoid the cheapo PC-chips and MSI MBs, they don't perform that well for the price. ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel or maybe ECS motherboards are all that I ever use. Intel's good quality, but not much tuning options, while ASUS is the most flexible IMO. For $700-900, you can build a zippy 4ghz dual-core system. :) Here's a couple of systems I put together recently for friends with the Pentium-D805 guts from 3.6-4.1ghz. The systems are cheap, it's really the quad-output video-cards and screens that ends up costing the most:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e346/DannoXYZ/ComputerTech/TradingStation-BillGlenAimeePhillip.jpg

And this is what I want for myself, just waiting for the cost of the Dell 30" screen to come down a bit:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e346/DannoXYZ/ComputerTech/Dell3007WFP2x2001FP.jpg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131013

2 raid controllers, 4 ram slots and on sale

Holy Shi...crap, Danno!

I guess computing power is kinda like money and good looks, huh? You just can't have "too much" ! :)

Here's another deal:

NewEgg - Intel Pentium D 805 $81.80 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819116001R)
NewEgg - ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe $112.99 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131536R), has 4xDDR2 slots for up to 8gb memory, on-board parallel & serial ATA RAID

For $200.00 you have the heart of a 3.6-4ghz dual-core system, not bad. :) The slightly slower AMD Athlon-64x2 5000+ CPU alone is about $350. :(

My friend has the 4ghz system, It was a joy to play games on! +1 on the motherboard, get the best you can. When I got mine, I got it to support way the hell more than I need. Supports something like 3.8ghz intel processors, with at least 4GB of RAm available. 800mhz FSB. This leaves room for upgrade later. Right now I am only using 2.4ghz for a CPU, and just 512MB of 400mhz ram. My Fedora Core 5 setup, with music playing a lot of firefox tabs open is only using 255.7MB of RAM.
I do plan on buying another 512MB stick of the same speed and go dual channel though, just in preparation for FC6 :).

One cool thing to do is run a Live Linux OS, and load the whole thing to ram (if you have the room available). You will be flying

Now, if there's a way to keep that RAM alive with the OS already loaded on... just think of how fast you can get your computer to boot up... hmm... Looks like we want one of these: Samsung's 32 GB Flash Drive Previewed (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/). Check out the web-server performance chart.. heh, heh... ;)

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/samsung-flash-disk-pers.jpg