Speckeldorf wrote:
Didy: That one time in Gabbly where I was raving about the new Mac Pro, and you said your old Dell was 3 Ghz, I forgot to mention-- the Mac Pro has 2 Core Duo processors, which basically means it has 4 processors, which almost sort of means that it's 12 Ghz...
Well, a 3ghz Xeon absolutely leaves a 3ghz Pentium 4 in the dust, thanks to a totally new architecture.
As for your claim of 12ghz, that's simply impossible unless you have...a 12ghz processor. Each processor in the Mac Pro runs at 3ghz. However, you have 4 processor cores available. Therefore, you can have instructions running on each core at the same time, rather than waiting for an instruction to finish to execute another one - which is the case on a single-core, single-processor computer.
Example: You're applying a Photoshop effect to an image
*. It requests a new thread (basically, an execution unit) to run the code for said effect. The OS can allocate that thread to a core that is currently sitting idle, so it gets the full processing power of that core - instead of waiting for other things to finish and fitting the filter thread inbetween those (or worse, pausing everything else to let the filter run), which would happen in a single (or even dual) core scenario.
So that's a pretty high-level overview of why 2 dual core processors at 3ghz does not mean 12ghz. Hope I didn't confuse you.
*I know that Photoshop currently runs in an emulator on the Mac Pro, let's just assume that it runs natively for argument's sake._________________
Homerun Starrer wrote:
Sinscreen! It protects your skin from evil!
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