[quangdiggity]

Hey……
i was wondering, do the 2 cores in the iMac represent two processors?
and if so, does it mean that each one is 1.83 GHz? ie 3.66 Ghz?
or are they 1.83 GHz all together? ie 915 Mhz?


just wondering....... although it may be a dumb ass question

[ghporter]

Each core is a separate processor running at 1.83GHz.

[hookem2oo7]

and with applications that are written to take advantage of dual processors the theoretical "speed" that you can say, encode video at is around 1.75x the clock speed. this isn't set in stone, some apps utilize both cores better than others, some worse

[quangdiggity]

ok.... thats positive to hear

so in theory it is like 3.66 GHz... making it beat the majority of Pc's.....

but i'm wondering;
if there is one computer with 1 core at 3 Ghz, is it better or worse than 2 running at 1.5 Ghz each??

[JimKane]

1 core at 3GHz will in almost all circumstances out perform 2 cores at 1.5GHz. There are exceptions, but in the general case this is the rule. As hookem2oo7 stated you will typically get 1.75x of the multiple core chip's speed.

So in general 2 cores at 1.5GHz will perform like a single 2.6GHz core in most cases.

[gblakely14]

You can't really say 1.66+1.66 = whatever.

But core duo's are a completly different design to p4's. The top of the range core duo overclocked, can beat top of the range p4's and the Amd Fx 60(Overclocked). Even though they are at lower clockspeeds.
Its to do with a shorter pipeline + Improvements.

[Tomchu]

A 1.83 GHz Core Duo running a properly multi-threaded application will get you the performance of about a "3.15 - 3.45 GHz Core Solo". A single-threaded application on the same processor will only use one core, so you'll only get 1.83 GHz of Core Solo performance for that application.

You can't compare the clock speeds of the Core processors to a Pentium 4 either.

Oh, and if the reason you're asking this question is so that you can brag to some PC users about having a "3.6 GHz processor", don't even bother -- you'll come across someone who knows their thing about SMP and they'll shoot you down. :-P