This article seems to be slanted on purpose to show that a dual is just not worth it. If that is the case he did a great job at scaring away lay people that think a dual will run a game at 2x the speed.

I do think he knows the true benifits of a dual he choose not to demostrate them because the purpose of the review was to show that a dual is not as fast as many people think.

I agree that a dual for most is not worth the cash. Let me list the reasons why a dual is not worth it.

Upgrades - If you have a dual it will cost you 2x the money to upgrade your cpus.

Games - they will not run 2x the speed , sometimes slower.

Wordprocessing - you can only type so fast

HEAT! - Damn MPXs put out enough heat to make your room noticably warmer.

But why do we people want the duals?

1. Bragging rights. - sure we know the games won't be 2x faster but our some of our dumb friends don't and boy just seeing their eyes light up as they see my twin copper heatsinks thru my neon window kit

2. Smoothness - I don't need no stinkin benchmarks to tell how butter smooth my dual is vs my old single cpu.

3. Multitasking - Printing a document use to reallly drag my single cpu down to a crawl. Now I can play quake and print at the same time. I acutally do this quite often. There are a million multitasking examples that are real life. Burning a CD, encoding mp3 while watching cable on my TV card.

4. Multithreading apps - Most people do not have these but if you do they really work well on a dual.

I think Mr Sanders owes it to the dullies to do another write up but this time I want him to slant it in the direction of "if you have the cash here are the reasons you would want a dual"

I know you can do it!!

He is also assuming that you are paying for the machine. I went from a Dual PII-450 to a Single P4 1.6, and there is not much difference performance-wise.

While there is no way the duallie could outrun the P4 machine, it often outmanoeuvred it

I wish I had asked for a Dual-Xeon machine instead.

My next work machine will be a duallie. My next home upgrade will probably be to Dual P-IIIs.

If you are a power-user, Duals are a viable option - however, if you are a gamer, spend your money elsewhere.

Prang

I disagree,

there are plenty of reasons even on games to have a dual system. But primarily, there has to be a cost range for developers to support SMP in games and other software.

I agree with the frist poster, a SMP system will be a much more stable system when different multitasking items occur. Even for the home user that will be a significant improvement in use. Now it is a matter of price point.

But when enough systems are available to the developer to warrent the cost of implementing multithreading at the home user level. than it will happen.

Intel will be introducing single processor systems that have multithreading capability(the prescott)
Present day xeon already have that ability, which may explain the huge jump. the article in effect probably has a dual xeon with hypertheading giving an effect of a 4 way system.

but as SMP becomes more prevalent. game developers can use multithreading for many purposes in the games they developer. Emulation of physics systems etc

Of course with GPU's that are becomeing real time 3d rendoring computers. you already have a SMP system with dedicated processors to the task at hand.

it is a shame that the availability of smp systems isn't more prevalent, and that MT isn't used more often in games as it would dramtically improve performance of some RTS games. One of the quake series was SMP capable (don't remember which one) but I played it both on a Single processer and a dual proccessor machine and you could tell the difference.

Of course today even the quake 3 engine isn't a issue for most processors.

DRH

Douglas,

What, specifically, were you disagreeing with? As far as I could tell I was not arguing with the first poster - I was agreeing with him.

Gamers will get little out of an extra CPU. That is axiomatic and will be for at least the next twelve months. I have heard that Quake III can run in SMP mode, but the improvement is modest and probably not with an extra CPU. Unless both the game and the API are designed for SMP, gaming on Duallies will yield no benefit. Maybe one day games will be written that way, but it is very unwise to buy computer hardware for "Maybe One Day" usage.

I have read about hyperthreading, and a single CPU with hyperthreading will not outperform Dual CPUs without (according to http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093952,00.html). As for me, I would rather have Dual PIII-1GHz than a single P4 2GHz in my machine.

>> Of course with GPU's that are becomeing real time 3d rendoring computers. you already have a SMP system with dedicated processors to the task at hand.

Close but no cigar. That is distributed processing. Such a system could possibly be considered a MP (Multi Processor) system, but not an SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) one. Besides, many peripherals (such as Hard Disks) have some kind of built-in processor...

I am not against Dual-CPU machines - on the contrary. However, for the moment, gamers would be better served putting the money towards removing system bottlenecks - such as GPU, CPU, Memory or Hard Disk.

Me, I am looking for a Dual-PIII board for my next upgrade.

Prang