Big.Wayne said:
Yes kinda, however if the software you are using is multithreaded then it will almost be like it is running at 3.6GHz (well more like 3.2GHz as you don't get 100% speed up from the extra cores).
Depends on the application, number crunching applications, (folding/seti whatever), can simply be run twice, once on each core. This will run pretty much 100% efficiently, as each application never needs to wait for results from the other. So gains are very close to 100%.
However if a multithreaded application ever needs the results from 1 thread to process another, then the second thread will be stalled until the results are ready. So a 'badly' written multithreaded application will offer very little gain over a singlethreaded application.
However its still wrong to say the chip performs like a 3.6Ghz. If you run a single loop of code, a true 3.6 would complete it faster every time. What you have is a pair of 1.8ghz processors, and thats the speed they run at.
To make an analogy, If a bus with 40 seats, travels at 40mph, it can get 40 people 80 miles in 2 hours. A car with 4 seats travelling the same road at 80mph gets 4 people there in an hour. The bus gets a lot more work done overall, but the 4 people in the car get there in half the time.
Its generally the same with multicore processors. The higher speed single core chips 'may' get the first results out quicker, but once you are talking 10, 100 or 1000 results, then the multicores catch up (or even overtake).
Multicores also add new possibilities, as already mentioned a game might use core 1 to work in tandam with the graphics card to provide a games visual environment, but it can run a separate physics thread on the second core to make the games 'laws of physics' more lifelike. Add a Quadcore, and suddenly you find a game can dedicate another thread to increase artificial intelligence of all the monsters/npc's in the game, even a thread to process lifelike 3 dimensional 'dolby digital' audio in real time. Multicore use is only limited by the programmers imagination.
. Say if you run Firefox and then run Photoshop, usually one cpu is dedicated to each program so 1.8ghz to Firefox and 1.8ghz to Photoshop. That is how i think it works. Dual Core optimized games dedicated certain processes like physics to certain cpus.
