Quad Core – How much is too much?

11.08.06 Posted in News by Mathew

Intel have announced availability of new Quad Core CPU’s. To recap what this means exactly, the old Pentium 4 CPU’s (which you still see some places flogging) are a single CPU. The new range of Core 2 Duo chips are in fact two CPU’s in the one neat package. You can two for the price of one, so to speak.

Now Intel are producing chips with four CPU’s in the one package. In fact, at a recent conference, an Intel spokesperson said that the company plans to have as many as eighty CPU’s in the one package in the not to distant future!

All of this is very exciting for us tech heads, but I thought it was worth pointing out that the vast majority of software in use today simply gets no benefit from all these CPU’s. The new Core 2 Duo’s CPU’s are certainly a lot faster than the Pentium 4, but for the average user, moving to a Quad Core CPU will make NO difference at all. The programs (things like Word and Excel, for instance), just can’t use all those cores.

In reality, computing power is taking a quantum leap forward, but it won’t mean much to most people until the way we do things with PC’s, or even what we do with them, changes radically to match.