(For Network Administrators)

Advertisements have been promoting dual core and quad core PC recently. What should schools know about them? How can schools can make use of them? This article attempts to provide a background for network administrators towards those questions. A shock to begin with- a toy called Play Station 3 is based on an 8-core CPU! It is a device that is more advanced than all PC’s and servers in the x86 technology domain. Many “open source” people have managed to convert the device into tool. Our not-so-adventurous counterparts are not as lucky but are equally content as adventures do come hand in hand with risks that may not be worthwhile to touch at all. In the x86 Domain, Intel came up with Hyper Threading technology in 2002 for Pentium 4. Hyper Threading uses resources in the CPU not occupied by a running application for a second application. It gave the end user the impression that there are 2 CPU in the system. Indeed, Windows 2000 did recognise 2 CPUs from a Pentium 4 CPU. Hyper Threading has turned out to be a non-event as the overhead of managing the parallel use of CPU resource has outweighed the benefits. Intel came up with a real dual core CPU in 2005 called Pentium D and Extreme Editions. The performance improvement has become more significant, but many third parties have found that AMD single core Athlon64 on K8 technology platform out-performed Pentium EE. Doubts of dual cores abound. Frankly, how many software applications were written for dual core? Ask the software suppliers of the school and they possibly do not have the answer. See attached PPT for more information.

PPT:  2007-04_Multi_Core_CPU 641.73 Kb