SHINY VIDEO: Quad vs Dual – how many cores do you really need?
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Just before Christmas, Dan and I took delivery of a dual core and a quad core machine, and we thought we’d see if it’s actually worth putting four cores into your computer, rather than two. We ran four processor-intensive concurrent tasks – a virusscan, a DVD encode, a 3D game, and then we measured how long it took to unzip a zip file.
The results? Well, you’ll have to watch the video to find out. I’ll just say that I was surprised by the outcome. Let us know your experiences of Quad core vs Dual core chips in the comments below.
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3 comments
“here’s every possibility that glitches can show up in the encoded file if you’re trying to do loads of things at once”
The glitches will be down to poor quality ripping / encoding software and/or the DVD drive itself, and nothing to do with how busy the processor is.
By architecture, a processor doesn’t skip doing something or do something differently just because its busy – that would cause CHAOS if you were using mission critical business software.
Your test is slightly floored in that both virus scanning and unzipping a large file are actually highly IO intensive tasks, not CPU – this is why you don’t see much of a difference. You really need to pick 4 CPU intensive tasks OR 1 multi-threaded CPU intensive task.
Also, “lost packets” haha, you do know how a computer works don’t you?? Just because a DVD encoder is running a little jumpy doesn’t mean the output quality is going to be worse, it just means its going to take longer to complete.
Yeah, “lost packets” was a misspeak. However, there’s every possibility that glitches can show up in the encoded file if you’re trying to do loads of things at once. I’ve had it happen to me before.
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