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At UNEASYsilence we get quite a few questions about how tech works (or at least my email box does). People looking for understandable nongeeky answers on fundamental computing technologies that everyone takes for granted.

To help inform the community several times a week, I will either personally explain or link to something that dissects and comprehensively explains a specific computing technology.

Todays task, Multiple core processors.

A multi-core processor is an piece of silicon which two or more processors have been attached for enhanced performance, reduced power consumption, and more efficient simultaneous processing of multiple tasks.

Think of it as a having separate processors installed in the same computer. The advantage to having multiple processors on a single piece of silicon, is that the connection and intercommunication between the independent processors is faster then if they were on separate pieces of silicon.

It is easy to assume that a dual core processor is nearly twice as powerful as a single core processor. In practice, performance gains are said to be about fifty percent: a dual core processor is likely to be about one-and-a-half times as powerful as a single core processor.

A dual-core processor has many advantages especially for those looking to boost their system’s power, as clock speeds on processors not improving at the rate of speed as they did in the early 2000’s

For a computer to really get a speed boost out of a dual-core processor, both the operating system and applications running on the computer should support a technology called “Multi threading” (Basically allowing a program to simultaneously execute multiple tasks, on multiple processors)

Even without a multithread-enabled application Microsoft Windows XP, MacOS X or Linux (Which all support multithreading) will hand off tasks in an even manner to both cores of your processor making the compuer feel faster.

However, having more cores isn’t always better! The noticeable speed improvement all depends on the demand of the Applications trying to utilize the processor. For example, Microsoft Word open on a dual core machine is no faster then Microsoft Word on a eight core machine. The program isn’t demanding enough to fully utilize the extra cores.

However, if you run Photoshop, Illustrator, Avid all at the same time (besides using a ton of system RAM), these programs would greatly benefit, due to the complexity of the calculations they require.

So, do you need the newest Core2Duo machine produced? If you are just running a web browser, and email client – the answer is NO. However if you plan to do photo, video or audio manipulation we say get as many cores as your wallet can afford – and plenty of RAM, but thats for our next column.

[Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4]