If you're buying new machines, sticking with the older dual core processors is a wise choice (and making sure they've got at least 1MB of L2 cache is also a good idea). In late 2007, we should be able to get our hands on *real* quad-core processors, and that gives hope that by 2008, they will not suck as bad as these half-baked attempts at getting a product out the door by 2006 (and who cares what quality). Hopefully by 2008 quad-cores will even be affordable (although the cooling may cost more than the processor!!! ).

I think the bigger problem at the moment, as has been demonstrated by many benchmarks, is that there is a serious lack of true multi-threaded software. The worse part is that the software that could benefit the most from the extra crunching power is solely single threaded.

Best examples I can think of are LAME MP3 encoding and XviD Video encoding.

I have a Turion64 X2 here.

lame.exe uses from 95 to 100% of my two cores and encodes mp3 at a speed of 24/25x.

That's what I call a truely multi-threaded app.

I have a Turion64 X2 here.

lame.exe uses from 95 to 100% of my two cores and encodes mp3 at a speed of 24/25x.

That's what I call a truely multi-threaded app.

Then why is it that every single processor completes in the exact same time as their single cored equivalent? Not to mention that the quad core processor completes in the exact same time as the dual core version? That's not what I call multi-threaded.

LAME Benchmarks

Maybe because they used a non-threaded core!

http://rarewares.org/mp3.html

I don't know where the CPU usage comes from 70%. But anyway, you see the speed, you see the CPU usage for each core and you also see that drops in CPU usage correspond to IO operations.

PS: I guess the weird display has been caused by foobar's transparency + process explorer.

edit: why the hell is my screenie blurry ??

Edited December 2, 200619 yr by Camarade_Tux