Dual core desktops in ~2 months

Question

See article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050421_090000.html
...those are some pretty painful pricing points though.  At least the rumors about dual-core not forcing a reduction in core speed for the Athlon64 like it does on the P4 seem true.  I guess the high prices may be offset by the fact that the chips are compatible with current MB's, unlike dual-core P4's that require a whole new MB in order to work.

Answer 1

I'm going to have to disagree there...if all you do with your computer is run one large application at any given point, then yes, dual core is pretty pointless for you.  However, if you run more than one single threaded application (say a game + downloads + music + virus scanner in the background), dual core will offer a huge benefit (especially on AMD CPU's, which have never had anything comparable to the P4's HyperThreading), even though all those things are single-threaded (and lets be honest here, just about *every* computer user multitasks to some degree, so dual-core *will* help).  As far as operating systems go, as long as you have more than 1 active thread, Win XP will do a very nice job of keeping both cores busy, regardless of whether or not it is multithreaded itself.  Dual core is only a waste of time if you're one of those people who boots their system, suppresses as many of the default background tasks as possible, and then runs one single application for a long time and then shuts down.  For the rest of us, it offers the potential for some good performance increases now, and the opportunity for even better increases in the future as even single applications start to use more than one thread of execution.