dual core, say again?

[howard500]

hello guys,

I am no expert in laptops but I need to get a better one. I have my eye on a laptop that seems quite good for its price but I have a question which is bugging me badly, it comes with Intel Core Duo T2400 (thatÂ’s 1.83 GHz). Now in my ignorance, I have become accustomed to understanding that anything below 3.2 GHz is not worth it when buying new stuff. However, I know there is a trick here but I just canÂ’t put my finger on it, is it two 1.83 GHz processors or what??

In essence I am begging you to explain to me this dual core stuff, and why in the world are processor speeds lower and lower and if they are any good for what I want, which is for flight simulator with its world of addons, which is not a terribly demanding application but certainly needs its stuff so I mention the specs of the laptop for any advice you can give,


Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB), 2GB DDR2 667MHz SDRAM, (7,200 rpm) 100GB SATA Hard Drive, 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7800 Go, PCI-Express x16

Thank you all in advance,

Regards
howard500

 

[Nitestick]

the common misconception is that clock speeds are the sole factor in determining the performance of a processor. clock speed means the number of times a processor performs a certain set of things per second. 1ghz meaning 1 billion times per second. mobile processors and AMD processors tend to do far more things in each one of these cycles than Intel's desktop processors. e.g say an AMD does 12 things per cycle at 2.0ghz while a pentium 4 does 7 things per cycle at 3.0ghz (i think these numbers are way off its just an example) then the total output of each would be 12x2 billion vs 7x3.0 billion giving totals of 24 billion instructions per second vs. 21 billion instructions per second. so as you can see even though the AMD is clocked 1ghz lower than the pentium 4 it does more things per second. this applies similarly to mobile processors except they are also optimised to use less power

 

[howard500]

thanks for that nitestick, but how do you determine how many "things" per cycle does a given processor do? ie when deciding between a P4 @ 3.4 or Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83 GHz.

plus, I really like AMD64 stuff but cant find them in laptops at decent prices, any suggestions?

thanks again.

 

[Apokalipse]

AMD has made it easier to compare performance with its P-rating.
when AMD made their Athlon CPU's, they outperformed their Thunderbird CPU's of the same frequency. so AMD made their P-rating to compare the Athlons to the Thunderbirds
a 1400+ Athlon compared to a 1.4GHZ Thunderbird, and so on.

it also happens to work pretty closely against Pentium 4's. an Athlon 3000+ will compare to a Pentium 4 at 3GHZ.

however names for Intel CPU's are not very well thought out. they started calling them things like 560, 620 and so on, where a 560 will actually outperform a 620. I haven't really followed Intel's processor naming much, but they have made a large variety of CPU's with varying performance. Pentium M's at 2GHZ often outperform Pentium 4's at 3GHZ.

the best way to tell how fast a particular Intel CPU is to look at benchmarks between it and other CPU's