Confused - Dual Core and Core 2 Duo

[kimboy]

Hey I am confused by the terminologies Dual Core and Core 2 Duo, can someone please tell me something (not so technical) about the two CPUs? Some sales person in a PC shop told me that Core 2 Duo has chips? cores while a dual core has 2 chips? Is this informations right? Someone please reply as I am planning to upgrade from my ancient Pentium 4 machine to a new one and would like to get as much bang for my cash. Thanks.

 

[grahama]

From what I can make out they are both the same. Intel set out to confuse everyone by the Core 2 Duo thing while AMD just called it dual core. I have 2 computers. One running Core2Duo and the other an AMD dual core. A diagnostics program refers to each as having 2 CPU's

 

[captaincranky]

Pretty Much the Same Thing......

Some of the naming conventions have changed, particularly with Intel. This is being done to simply distinguish one line of CPU from the another.

Earlier Intel Dual Core offerings were called "Pentium "D" in the trade. The performance of these CPUs is nowhere near the newer line called "Core 2 Duo". Since the P4 line of single and dual core CPUs reputations were tarnished by running hot and not having the performance of AMD's similar offerings, Intel retired the "Pentium" brand for a while, but reactivated it with the new Pentium "Dual Core" E2xxx series. These are fine performing lower priced offerings, they just don't have as much L2 cache as the C2D series.

The issue of whether there is one or two separate processors on the actual die is sort of moot, the net result is pretty much the same. As you pointed out, Windows recognizes them as two separate CPUs. It's always fun to pull up "Task Manager" and see which of your programs utilize both of the cores, and to what extent.