7iDigital

Performance requirements from a processor are highly dependent on the types of applications running on the computer. The number of cores in a processor is an important performance parameter that impacts the overall system performance of a computer.

The “core” of a processor is the entity that is actually responsible for executing instructions - the machine language that software programs are translated to - on the processor. As a result, a single core processor can handle - loosely speaking - one task at a time, while a processor with multiple cores can handle multiple tasks at the same time.

If you look at the number of tasks in your task manager that are running at any point of time on your computer, you will notice that there are multiple tasks running - some of them would be the applications that you have started while others would be the system management tasks that are invoked by the operating system.

Considering this factor, it should be advantageous to buy a processor with as many cores as possible. But in reality, the performance of an application does not improve N-times when they are moved  from a system with single core processor to a system with a multi-core processor.

While multiple cores can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, the software programs that execute on the computer - The Operating System, Internet Browsers, Document Editors etc - have not been fully translated yet to harness the full potential of multiple cores on a processor. Developing software to take advantage of multiple cores is a tough problem mainly because of concurrency issues that arise when parts of applications running on the different cores try to access data from main memory. These problems are so complex that Intel and Microsoft have jointly funded a project for research in this area.

Applications such as internet browsers, document editors, instant messaging clients do not put a
huge amount of load on the computer. As a result computers buyers such as home users, business professionals, and students still see a good performance and stability gain when using a dual core processor.

On the other hand, games like Supreme Commander have been optimized to extract maximum performance from Quad Core processors. Also, there are some other graphics based special applications - e.g. ray tracing - which have been tuned to take the full advantage of the multiple cores on a processor. Buyers who plan to use a computer for these purposes should consider a computer system with Quad-core processors to get the maximum benefit.