I read where AMD is comong out with a Quad Core CPU.
I have a dual core Intel CPU. And I see no difference in anything from
when
I used a single core CPU. The MB bios and XP both see the dual core.
Can anyone explain what the difference/advantage between single,dual and
Quad core CPUs are?
Simply speaking it means a single processor that emulates 2 (dual core) or 4
(quad core) CPU's in parallel. Technically, Intel and AMD have some
differences, but they are not really important to the user.
I see you've already received the obligatory silly answer "Nothing unless
your software is written to support multiple processors." While it is true
that you can get more benefit from specially written code that supports
multiprocessing, depending on which version of XP you are using, you can get
significant benefits even with software written for a single processor.
First, as mentioned above, it depends on the version of XP. XP Home has
very rudamentary multiple processor support, generally the ability to run OS
tasks in one processor and application tasks in the other. It support no
processor balancing, and benchmarks show wild swings in processor usage
between one or the other processor at any point in time. XP Pro on the
other hand has significant code to support asynchronous multi-processing,
and will generally make better use of the parallel processors.
As far as applications are concerned, many applications spawn asynchronous
threads which the OS can dynamically assign to the multiple processors. An
example is the "on-the-fly" spell checkers in most word processing programs.
MS Word or Corel's WordPerfect typically have dozens of asychronous threads
active at any one time. Other programs like Photoshop, can spawn 100's of
asynchronous threads for photo editing. XP Pro can dynamically assign these
threads to the least used processor, thus balancing the usage of the
processors for better efficiency. I have no applications that support
multiprocessing directly, but typically have 150-200 active threads. Your
mileage may vary.
Finally, nothing works as well as a program that has direct multiprocessing
support. Oracle Database is a good example of such a program, and it flies
on a Quad Intel Xeon setup found on large servers.