QUOTE (Hondo @ Oct 6 2008, 05:54 PM)

The new dual cores are supposed to handle more things at once, so it should be faster than the old processor with the same speed. I'm no expert, but I was interested too. I want to upgrade to Vista soon, but all the warnings have me clinging to my old, slow HP running at 1.2 Ghz.

Intel® Core™ Dual-Core Link

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Intel® Dual-Core Technology
Designed from the ground up for revolutionary energy-efficient performance, Intel® dual-core processors enable exceptional productivity enhancing features and rich multimedia experiences. As the catalyst for new processor architecture design, Intel dual-core processors have become the standard for our desktop, mobile, and server platforms.

Do more at once than ever before with Intel inside
The Intel dual-core processor consists of two complete execution cores in one physical processor. Imagine that a dual-core processor is like a four-lane highway—it can handle up to twice as many cars as a two-lane road without making each car drive twice as fast.
Similarly, with an Intel dual-core processor, you can do more at once than ever before, without slowing down:
Boost multitasking power with improved performance for highly multithreaded and compute-intensive applications
Reduce costs and use less power with energy-efficient Intel dual-core processors built on Intel® Core™ microarchitecture
Enjoy flexibility and the performance to handle robust content creation or intense gaming with multimedia-enabling technologies built in

• If you're working 1+2 and 2+3, the dual processor could, theorectically, use one processor to handle the 1+1 task, while simultaneously using the other processor to process the 2+2. But at some point, the answers have to recombine in serial form to the output. In this case, the answers to purely independent tasks can be computed at something slightly less than twice as fast as a single processor (ceteris paribus). In this case, order doesn't matter (1+2 and 2+1 are the equivalent, just as 2+3 and 3+2). It doesn't matter which answer is displayed (or output) first [(3,5) or (5,3) are equally valid]; This is called the commutative law of addition. In this case, the two car analogy works.

• But suppose we type the simple sentence: "See cat." The analogy doesn't work at all. Neither "eSe act" or "cat see" are equivalent. The information must be processed and displayed in a serial fashion.