After building my own PC's for 10 years I bought my first mac today. I read on the apple website that all iMacs are now quad core. I went into town and bought the basic 21.5" 2.5Ghz i5 iMac, but it's not a quad, it's a dual core processor.
After my free update to Lion completed I sat down to look at what's there, I opened the Activity Monitor and got a surprise to see just 4 processes being monitored, I say a surprise as the windows system monitor shows 8 if the quad core has multiple threads, or 4 if it's a dual core multi thread such as a dual core i5.
But ok, I'm new to mac, maybe it's always spoke this way and always different.
So I then ran Cinebench and right enough, it says in plain english 2 cores totalling 4 threads. It's a bit much for apple to be saying all iMacs now have quad core processors when they blatantly don't.
Then I got thinking, if this is normal apple terminology, then does that mean the dual core i5 macbook pro's are actually pentium 4 processors (single core multi-threading). Then I thought if none of the iMac's are advertised as 8 core does that mean they are all dual core right throughout the range?
This is not a good start, can anyone clarify if any of these new iMacs actually do have quad core processors? And if the different models advertised, such as macbook pros's, dual core i5's are actually dual cores with 4 threads then that has to be illegal, saying one computer has a dual core and another a quad when they're the same.
Dave
After my free update to Lion completed I sat down to look at what's there, I opened the Activity Monitor and got a surprise to see just 4 processes being monitored, I say a surprise as the windows system monitor shows 8 if the quad core has multiple threads, or 4 if it's a dual core multi thread such as a dual core i5.
But ok, I'm new to mac, maybe it's always spoke this way and always different.
So I then ran Cinebench and right enough, it says in plain english 2 cores totalling 4 threads. It's a bit much for apple to be saying all iMacs now have quad core processors when they blatantly don't.
Then I got thinking, if this is normal apple terminology, then does that mean the dual core i5 macbook pro's are actually pentium 4 processors (single core multi-threading). Then I thought if none of the iMac's are advertised as 8 core does that mean they are all dual core right throughout the range?
This is not a good start, can anyone clarify if any of these new iMacs actually do have quad core processors? And if the different models advertised, such as macbook pros's, dual core i5's are actually dual cores with 4 threads then that has to be illegal, saying one computer has a dual core and another a quad when they're the same.
Dave
