Single-Core CPUs vs Multi-Core CPUs

• CPU manufacturers "hit the wall" around 4 GHz. At that speed, heat and power issues became limiting factors they found hard to overcome. At the same time, it became possible to put multiple cores on a single chip substrate, so the future seemed to lie with multithreaded multicore CPUs. But that was only half the story. To take advantage of parallel processors, software must be rewritten to use the available resources. Software development is expensive and time-consuming, so companies only revised the programs most able to benefit.
  
  

Benchmarking One-Core vs. Four-Core Performance

• The Tom's Hardware website conducted a benchmarking test to determine the advantages of two-, three-, and four-core processor performance relative to a single-core CPU. They started with a Core 2 Quad Core system and selectively disabled one, two, three or no cores. They used a number of real-world applications, popular games and "synthetic" tests created to exercise specific processor tasks, like graphics- or memory-intensive operations.
  
  

Benchmarking Test Results

• The test results were easy to interpret. Applications and games that demand CPU resources have, in a number of cases, evolved through rewrites to use four cores efficiently. Other utilities, like .WAV-to- .MP3 converters, were not so lucky. The "synthetic" benchmarks showed that in most circumstances, the addition of another core resulted in roughly equal increments in performance from the second through fourth cores. Overall, in some cases the most dramatic difference was between one and two cores.