Wuts up with the dual core processors?

No need to wait.

Dual core could possibly be introduced Q2 06; I would not be surprised if it were later than that. The estimates on Longhorn are late 2006, too; I believe.

I'd say neither dual-core or Longhorn are worth waiting for, unless you have purchased a laptop recently.

dual core is basically putting two cpus onto one package
so you would have one chip to put on your motherboard but it is recognized as a dual processor setup by the operating system
so basically, the same caveats for dual processor apply to dual core
it wont help gaming and amd has even conceded that it would be best to get the fastest clocked single core athlon64 for gaming (at least until dual core support is implemented in games)
but if you do a lot of multitasking, dual cores will be nice
if you are used to your computer basically becoming unusable when encoding movies or whatever app you do, with dual cores, you will find that your computer wont slow down much at all when doing these heavy tasks (assuming you dont try to do TOO much )

also it will be interesting to see the power usage on dual cores. they might not be something you want to run in a laptop computer but only time will tell

Search it on google. There are many good sites such as anandtech.com, tomshardware.com, and xbitlabs.com that have technical specs. And sites like theinquirer.net often have good and really accurate rumors/realease info.

I suggest that you take a look at this excellent article about the subject:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...dual-core.html

All you need to know, for now

Both AMD and Intel plan on offering dual core products in the near future, and also in the mobile market in the enxt 12 months. AMD plans on a dual core mobile processor by the end of 05, which has no names on their roadmap yet(part of Turion line??). And intel has the dual core Yonah planned for late 05 or early 06 (although it won't be a complete dual core, since It will have shared cache).

The first dual cores out will be the AMD Opteron versions in ~June this year, mostly for 1/2/8 way servers/workstations. Intel plans on releasing the Smithfield in ~July, which although a dual core processor, lack certain technologies of a mature dual core design (such as cache integrity and snooping), which will be for high end desktops. Intel also has the ultra expensive Montetico dual-core planned for Q4, which will not be anything you or I will ever be able to afford (for high end servers with >32MB cache) in the IA64 tradition, as the next generation Itanium. Around the same time, AMD will be introducing the dual core Athlon 64 FX, code named Toledo, and will be for high end desktops as well; and also a dual core mobile CPU (whether a modification of Toledo, we do not know). We have to wait and see how much of this actually comes to fruition.

I certainly hope this Dual-Core thing won't be an end to battery life on laptops.

Now theres a great and marketable idea, Laptops with no battery life!

yeah, nothing like being able to run Doom III 1600x1200 at 90 FPS for 5 seconds

Actually, it shouldn't affect the battery life much at all, because in both AMD and Intel mobile dual cores, under certain steppings and/or low power mode, the second core will be inactive, and thus most components of the processor, ALU, FPU, decode, pre-fetch, registers, branch-prediction, retirement, etc, etc. would also consume the same amount of power as single cored predecessors under single threaded mode.

The only difference is the amount of L2 cache. In the intel Yonah, the Cache will be shared, so even when only one core is active, the entire cache will consume power. But in the dual core Turion/A64, the cache will be likely be split, (not entirely sure) more of a true dual core design; this will mean that even teh L2 cache will consume half amount of power when one of the cores is inactive.

From AnandTech.com:

"With most desktop applications continuing to be single threaded, dual core will still have to wait until there is more application support before truly being useful on the desktop. Heavy multitaskers and those running workstation applications will appreciate the benefits of dual core, but gamers and most other users will find higher clocked single core chips to be better suited for their needs...

"If anything, the release of larger cache and dual core desktop processors is a way to continue to promote the "newer, faster, better" upgrades without necessarily improving performance all that much...


"It's a necessary move in order to gain more traction and support for multithreaded desktop applications but its immediate benefit to the end user will be limited."

From what I understand dual core processors don't increase the power usage that significantly.

That's good. I guess each CPU can have a significantly lower clock speed to? Like 2 CPUs at 1 GHz can be the equivilant of a single P4 at 3.6 GHz?

What we know so far is that the dual core Opteron and Smithfield will both be clocked lower than their highest clocked single core counterparts. Dual core opteron will be clocked up to 2.40GHz with 95W TDP (about the level of A64 4000), and the Smithfield upto 3.2 GHz (about the level of P4E 540) and likely will have the thermal envelop of >150W. It's not clear how they will clock the first dual core Mobile A64 or PM.

But for most PC applications today, we will not see any significant advantages of dual core processing until the advent of Longhorn, and some of these dual core processors will actually underperform the single cored versions due to lower clock rates. There are not much software optimized for dual core processors out there except SMP server/workstations market.

Why Longhorn? So long as the OS supports SMP (Windows XP does), there shouldn't be any advantage.

There will be minor speed advantages to dual core processors (Assuming same clockspeeds), as some things can still be offloaded. For example, if you are compressing a file, maybe ZIPping it up, you will see a speed bump, because the CPU usage taken up by the I/O operations (Even DMA devices still use processing power, just not for the device itself.) can be offloaded, freeing up more for the compression. Yes, it's a very minor speed boost, likely only 5 or 10 percent, but it is there.

Besides that fact anybody that does any video encoding should see a huge boost, as there are a lot of programs that support SMP or hyperthreading.

In fact, any app modified to take advantage of hyperthreading should also benefit from dual-core CPUs, as taking advantage of hyperthreaing is essentially the same as taking advantage of two CPUs.

WinXP Home currently does not support SMP, so you will really see OS SMP support being brought to the masses by Longhorn. That aside, what I meant foremost was that currently there are not many Windows Applications that will support SMP. Hyperthreading does allow efficient execution of two single threaded programs, in multitasking. But very few consumer oriented programs today use multiple threads or are capable of taking advantage of SMP.

There could be a small speed increase for DMA transfers, if it is done by the DMA controller in third-party DMA. But with Bus Mastering (first party DMA) of an HDD, there is virtually no CPU usage during the data transfer, but only in DMA initialization.

Dual core processors will increase power usage by a percentage. Example, a P4 prescott burns about 120w under load. Intel is saying they will make a dual core out of the prescott. Basically they are adding another prescott minus the L1, L2 cache to the core. The thing will probably cook at 170-180w of heat dissipation. Using a Dothan core, Intel could cram EIGHT cores on the die for the same power budget.

Second, most dual core designs run at a much lower clockspeed than single cores. If you have a single threaded app, it will run slower on a dualcore with a lower clock than the single core, but it you multitask lots of processes or threads, you system will be more responsive.

Personally, I think data centers will benefit more from dual core than consumers. In my data center we have a limit to how dense we can pack systems because of power limits. If I can get more processing power per watt in a rack, I am better off. Dual core, lower power designs solve this problem. A multicore dothan design would be ideal for blade servers and dense clusters of 1U systems.

Will the dual core be using the same socket as current p4s?