As a result of the never-ending demand for advances in technology and speed, designers have reached a level where the ability of heat dissipation with current CPU performance benchmarks needs to be re-designed for the sake of, if anything, desktop practicality.
Moore`s law states that the amount of transistors in a processor will double every two years. To this end the culminating effect has been that a CPU can no longer handle the amount of transistors without becoming a mini thermo-nuclear device.
When looking for a possible solution, examples can be drawn from server CPUs that have the option of running two physical processors. Applications using this kind of design have always exhibited a significant boost in performance.
Another example comes from an invention by Intel, namely Hyper-Threading Technology also known as HT Technology, which allows a single core processor to process two threads at the same time thus enabling applications with multiple thread support to render improved operations.
Even so, these developments are still not satisfactory considering that a top-of-the-line Pentium radiates enough heat-energy to start oil-less cooking if everything else fails.
Indeed, the quest for efficient cooling has become a necessity as PCs are also becoming increasingly noisier. Having two of these behemoths in a PC would see most homes relinquish their heaters in favour of everybody crowding the PC.
Thankfully, advances in silicone processing and CPU manufacturing have allowed the respective CPU companies to develop a unit that has two cores on the surface area of a single processor, with a heat rating similar to that of the current single core flagship.
This development reveals a new world of multi-tasking to us. No longer will we have to worry about the amount of applications we have open at one time. Background tasks will no longer affect the primary application being used and operating systems (OSs) are intelligent enough to route the workload to the applicable core.
Multi-tasking will finally live up to its name - realising the ability to encode and watch a movie at the same time, maybe catch up on some work, or play a game while the machine dynamically balances the load.
With each core able to address its own portion of memory, no resource problems will be experienced and with both cores able to handle 64-bit instructions and memory addressing, the amount of memory that can be installed in the PC is boundless.
Moreover, applications can be designed so that certain functions rely on core one while others rely on core two. Games can now have proper multi-player functionality on a single PC with the game being able to send multiple renders to a separate CPU.
We can consider these developments as a first but significant step into the realm of multi-core and dual-core processing. Nevertheless, it is only the tip of the iceberg of processor-kind.
Consequently with technology evolving speedily, we can realistically look forward to CPUs that have four cores including PCs delivered with four monitors in the near future, which will undoubtedly redefine productivity as we know it.
The competitive jostle of who gets the CPU to market first is beginning to rear its head and AMD and Intel are both pushing to get the dual-core chips to the masses, with the cheaper and quicker upgradable one between the two dictating the outcome.
By Michael Hann, Gigabyte product manager at Rectron Holdings
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