Quad Core vs Dual Core – Performance

Just like putting in more cylinders in a car engine provides greater speed and power, one would think that putting in twice as many processors should double the performance speed, right? Unfortunately, that is not true in case of multiprocessor chips and the speed does not double up, but is substantially higher. The reason for that is twofold. Although a dual or a quad core has multiple cores, the clocking speed does not double up as the task is not shared by the two or four processors simultaneously. However, there is an increased multitasking ability due to division of tasks among the chips. So quad cores can be fast but not twice as fast.



The second reason why the increased speed of the quad core due to greater multitasking ability is not useful is the incompatibility of softwares being run on them. The software that is being run has to have a multithreading facility. That is, it should be programmed to be able to use the four cores at a time! Very few software products can do that currently. If you run Adobe Photoshop on a quad core, which has a multithreading facility, you will see the application zooming fast compared to that on a dual core computer. Though the clocking speed is not substantially higher than dual core processors, quad processors offer phenomenal multitasking ability which surpasses any other processors. Let us get into a more specific comparison in terms of the quad core vs dual core – benchmarks. Here I present a performance comparison between Intel's dual core vs quad core processors and AMD's quad core vs dual core processors.