Dear Forum,
I am trying to deceide between the Acer AS1551-4650 and the Acer Aspire AO721-3574. Which will run best? The 1551 is 1.3GHz dual core, and the 0721 is 1.7 Ghz single core. Both have 2G RAM.
Thanks!
Mike
The RAMs are ok but if your basis is core better choose the single core... why? because it is much higher than the dual core now if other's may think the dual core is much higher with this reason 1.3GHz + 1.3 GHz = 2.6GHz they're totally wrong!!! if you will going to test the monitor CPU usage if 75% core was in use and only 25% core of the other core was used you still have the equivalent of one CPU core doing nothing. Not unless if your dual core is both 1.7GHz
But the dual core is much faster than a single core processor in a sense that it can execute more instructions per second.
yeah that reference is no use at all, the majority of applications, games and operating systems are coded to take advantage of the fact there is more than one thread available and will therefore deliver an increase in performance over a higher clocked single core cpu.
The lower clocked dual is better as it allows the use of multiple threads to process information quicker than a higher clocked single core cpu working on one thread.
In my experience and personal preference, I'll take more cores over faster cores every time. Unless we're talking a huge speed difference of course, but that's definitely not the case here.
Even if your programs are single-threaded, get the dual-core. It'll be much smoother since no one program can hog all the CPU power for itself (and those that can, well, they obviously are multi-threaded and will simply run faster).
I have this single core Pentium 4 run at 3.4GH with hypertreads complete wprime 1.55 32m benchmark at 95.14 seconds, and I also have this laptop with intel core 2 dual core t5500 run at 1.66GH complete the wprime 1.55 32m benchmarkat 53.85 seconds. so dual core are faster than single core even they are run at half clock speed.
cheers.
that only works out at 100% core utilization on all cores without any power saver features on. Generally I'd multiply the GHZ by 3/4 of the # of cores to get an average of performance comparativeness.
basically to get a comparison of my 2 dual core laptops it would be 2*1.5 vs. 2.8*1.5. comes to 3.5 vs. 4.2. the athlon processor is faster, but the faster HDD and RAM in the pentium makes it overall faster.
Either way to the O.P., Get the dual core. The modern OSs are programmed to take advantage of multiple threads, which you will not get out of that single core. Even a HT single core is not as good as a single threaded dual core. (1 core 2 thread vs. a 2 core 2 thread.)