Gisele got a new computer for Christmas, with a “Dual Processor” CPU. The technical details: It’s an Intel 820, which runs at 2.8 GHz. She has 1Gig of Dual DDR2 RAM, and a fast SATA hard drive.<\/p>\n
I did some playing around with it to see if I could tell any difference between her computer and mine, which is a 2.6 GHz (single CPU) with similar RAM and hard drive. Both computers are running Windows 2000. Of course, hers has a newly installed OS, while mine has accumulated stuff for two or three years, so it’s not a completely fair test, but anyway…<\/p>\n
The dual CPUs are supposed to divide the work between the processors, with (as I understand it) one focussing on whatever you have in the foreground, while the other handles the background tasks. If the foreground program is written to take advantage of the dual processors, then that program can also see performance improvements, but not many programs are so written.<\/p>\n
I did a couple of qualitative tests: <\/p>\n
1) Just running single applications, I didn’t notice much difference. Opening and running Firefox or Open Office seemed to take about as long on either computer.<\/p>\n
2) You know how during startup, while the system is putting icons on the tray, loading the virus scanner, etc, you can click on the start button or an application and it pretends to acknowledge you, but it takes a long time for anything to come up. With Gisele’s computer it seemed to respond much more quickly, while the booting continued in the background.<\/p>\n
3) I started the virus scanner doing a full system scan in the background, then ran various programs in the foreground (Firefox, Open Office). I couldn’t even tell the virus scan was running. Everything was fast and responsive. On my computer the foreground slows down perceptibly while scanning for viruses.<\/p>\n
Next year Intel is coming out with new versions of the dual processor CPUs, which are supposed to share memory better and therefore perform even better. Quad processors are due out soon after that, but Windows 2000 can’t handle a quad (or more) processor and I’m loathe to install an activation-required OS from Microsoft. However, along with these multi-processor CPUs, there will be new software for running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer, so that might be the time to start phasing in Linux. I’ve tried VMWare on my current computer, but the background OS just takes up too much of the CPU and slows down the foreground OS too much. But with dual processors, that shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll see!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gisele got a new computer for Christmas, with a “Dual Processor” CPU. The technical details: It’s an Intel 820, which runs at 2.8 GHz. She has 1Gig of Dual DDR2 RAM, and a fast SATA hard drive. I did some playing around with it to see if I could tell any difference between her computer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}