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What's up with 8-core?
- Thread starter Kankki
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No. It's 8 3Ghz CPUs. This has been asked at least 2 or 3 time in the last month. Please do a search for the full reasoning.
Does a 3ghz 8-core Mac Pro Equal a 24ghz single core processor?
Thanks!
No.
Many applications can only use a single processor - so performance in such cases will be the same on a single core 3ghz machine as on an 8-core (or 32-core) systems. Having more than one processor does have a slight impact as different cores can deal with different tasks at the same time (but have to share disk and memory access). Some software is written to split up the tasks they undertake between multiple cores. Some audio and video processing. A good example is 3D rendering software.
In the real world the advantage of multiple cores is that some OS tasks can be running on one or more cores, while other programs run on others - giving better system responsiveness. A good example would be when I'm running Illustrator or Photoshop, and I've got iTunes running, while eyeTV is encoding a recorded program for iPod, while mail and Safari are running. Sometimes I fire up Lightwave - and it is then that I get close to the "full" speed (equivalent of 3 x 4 = 12 Ghz - probably closer to around about the equivalent of 10Ghz).