Cores cores cores

Question

Ok so I'm looking at all this new hardware and I have to wonder, just how it really works... on a system level. If you have X-# of cores with Y-amount of power, should the total system power be considered the sum of the cores or just the power of one core and the multi core system just improves multitasking?
I'm confused -_-;

Answer 1

Geek Patrol has some raw cpu comparisons of Macs, AMD and Intel systems.
Photoshop is a whole world of its own and depends on a number of variables and even might want a different setup than another set of applications.
Is it disk, memory or cpu bound? does the cpu chip or OS hop between processors effectively? Will it be memory bound? is there enough bandwidth on the front side bus and memory bus? can the drives "feed data" efficiently?
What is dual cpu/quad core?
There are benchmarks on servers using multicore and multiprocessor, and Apple has done some tests on 8-core Mac Pro with the latest video editing where tasks that once took an hour on G5 Quad were cut down to 10 minutes.
On my Mac Pro, I can be backing up a couple drives at once, while working on other drives (4 internal drives, dedicated boot drive, media RAID and backup) while opening 50 web sites in two browsers (for 100 total). So yes, sometimes you have enough bandwidth. It is often hard for standard applications to fully utilize four cores.
More RAM, better drives and controllers, video (and more apps off-load work to GPU, too) also go into it (as always).
By 2008 the front side bus should vanish in favor of a "point to point" protocol and in the meantime look for a better bus at 2:1 cpu speed, so a 1666MHz bus with 3.3GHz chips. But it should also get DDR3 800MHz DIMMs too to go along with it. It is the overall system.
And then there is the 32-bit vs 64-bit and what that will do (and if we'll see better compilers and code to use the system, which generally lags behind hardware by a year or more).