Hey, single-core CPUs are still very much alive and kicking according to Tom’s Hardware. Take look at some pretty close analysis as TH examines this subject from every angle you can think of…

The introduction of AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 and Intel’s Pentium D dual core processors will go down in the annals of semiconductor history as a revolution in processor architecture. Suddenly, the classic clock speed performance metric has been seconded by parallelism, which describes how two cores on a single chip boost performance by sharing the workload.

However, the path to parallel computing will be a long one, since the software is just not there yet. Applications are not optimized to take advantage of dual- or multi-core environments (of course, we’re not talking about multi-processor platforms). In order to take advantage of multiple processing units, software needs to be based on independent threads. This allows different workload components to be distributed to all available processing units, thus cutting down the processing time more than clock speed alone can do. However, the vast majority of software has not yet been designed to harness dual- or multi-core processing capabilities. [Read the rest]

[tags]single-core cpu,athlon 64 x2,intel’s pentium d,multi-core[/tags]