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Should we buy a PC with Core 2? But what is it? |
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July 2007 |
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You may have read advertisements that prompt you to buy a PC with Core 2 Dual or Core 2 Quad CPU and some prompt you to buy Athlon64 X2. Those advertisements assume that you know what those terms are, or that you do not need to know them as if you were buying a microwave or a fridge. For business owners, we suggest that a bit more knowledge on PC terminologies is helpful and will reduce the risk of spending in the dark. The two PC industry leaders, being Intel and AMD, have shifted their battlefield from CPU speed to the number of CPU cores. Core 2 is an Intel trade mark. Dual refers to 2 real CPU's built within 1 physical CPU enclosure. It is an advancement of fabrication technique. By doing so, the performance of a physical CPU with 2 cores jumps up to 170% (an arbitrary figure) of one with 1 core. Similarly Quad Core CPU provides more performance than Dual Core. There is always diminishing return as the number of cores increases due to the associated overheads of managing the cores within the CPU. AMD has a better multi-core architecture and it scales better. So, should we buy Dual Core or Quad Core CPU? This question is the same as "do we need more computational power". We need to look at 2 issues. One is from our own choices- some are imposed by our work habits and some imposed by the software we buy. We may run more applications in the same PC, or the old PC is too slow for the current set of applications. The other issue is on background activities such as anti-virus defense, automatic software patch updates, encryption or decryption of external traffic etc. As an experience, we need to upgrade the PC every 2 to 3 years to keep up with software and defense requirements even if we have not changed our work habits. Feel free to talk to
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for help as desired.
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