Jason Dunn
05-04-2005, 09:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120656,tk,dn050305X,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120656,tk,dn050305X,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"...the new system truly showed its mettle in certain portions of WorldBench 5--specifically our multitasking test and our media tests with Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator and Windows Media Encoder. Both applications are multithreaded, which means they can recognize and use the two cores as if they were two separate processors. On the multitasking test, the dual-core CPU produced its best result: It took just 9 minutes, 50 seconds to open numerous Web pages while converting video and music files to Windows Media format, whereas the single-core 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 took almost 12 minutes. It beat the Athlon systems' averages, too, and was a scant 9 seconds slower than the 3.73-GHz P4 EE unit."</i><br /><br />Curious about how dual core Intel CPUs will impact working with digital media? This article addresses the question, and it may surprise some to learn that with hyper-threading activated on both cores, performance actually decreased. One would think that four threads would be faster than two, even with overhead, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I wonder if that's something linked to Windows, or the CPU hardware itself?