Recently I decided to upgrade my desktop computer that I have owned for over 2 years. The old computer had a Pentium chipset (3.2GHz, single processor). My brand new computer had the next generartion Intel duo-core processor with two 2.6GHz processors. The old computer had 2GB of 400MHz memory; the new computer has 4GB or 800MHz memory. Both are running Windows XP. So, as far as the theoretical computations go...the new machine should absolutely smoke the old machine, right?
Well, reality isn't quite what the marketing says it should be. Overall, I'm OK with the new machine, but it was more of a lateral move to different equipment, not a huge upgrade to a 10,000 sq. ft. luxury manor if you know what I mean. I've poked around to see what might be going on, and here's what I learned.
It appears that most applications (Read: probably ALL business applications currently on the market) are not optimized for running in duo-core environment. Oh, they run ok, but here's what's going on. Let's say that I have Outlook, web browser and Photoshop open, and that I'm pretty much working in Photoshop. I sometimes initiate large transformations on our brochure files which can be as large as 500MB. Such transformations can take 30-60 seconds. During that time, I've looked at the processor consumption, and I find that I am running at 50% utilization. In other words, Photoshop has completely grabbed one processor and is using it exclusively. So, 50% of this super-duper horsepower that I bought is NOT being used by the process that I want completed.
What does it mean? This means that by going from a 3.2GHz older processor to a 2.6GHz duo core, some functions actually slowed down because the software can't use all 5.32GHz of computing power. They're just running at 2.6GHz. Admittedly, I can run more processes at the same time (e.g., while Photoshop is churning, I can go browse the web), but I'm still hanging around waiting for it to complete.
THE BOTTOM LINE: If you're doing lots of different stuff on your computer at the same time, your user experience will probably be better with one of these new duo core processors. But if you're trying to run one task REALLY fast, then you will be disappointed. Exception: I'm sure that a lot of the new video games are optimized to run duo core processes, and so I would expect that performance for games would be very good.
Leave a comment if I missed something.
Margaret Hokkanen
Comments(3)