On 14 Aug 2006 at 11:44, Dean Kukral wrote:

> I've been considering buying a laptop for some time now (in spite of the 
> fact that they are very bad deals and extremely inflexible).  One of the 
> things that I've noticed and thought was silly in a laptop was the dual-core 
> cpu.  However, I see here that you recommend it, and I'd like to know why. 
> (It may be moot soon enough, because most new laptops seem to be coming out 
> with them.)


  It certainly doesn't seem intuitive *to me*, but I've recently run across 
a claim that going to multiple cores allows manufacturers to achieve higher 
overall performance without pushing the basic clock rate -- increases in 
which lead to increased power lost as heat.  Since power consumption and 
heat dissipation are two key criteria in designing laptops, it actually 
makes sense that vendors would start migrating in this direction.

  It's probably true that the average laptop is used for fewer simultaneous 
tasks than some desktops, but if that task uses multiple threads (I suspect 
the more fully-featured browsers do...), they should indeed be able to take 
advantage of the extra core.

David Gillett

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