by Don Woligroski, Source: Tom’s Hardware US
“Many software developers have since been hard at work optimizing their applications to take advantage of multiple cores. Single-core CPUs are actually hard to find and two-, three-, and four-core CPUS are now the norm.
Which begs the question: how many CPU cores are right for me? Is a triple-core processor good enough for gaming, or should you splurge on a quad-core chip? Is a dual-core CPU good enough for the average user, or do more cores really make a difference? Which applications are optimized for multiple cores and which ones react only to specifications like frequency or cache size?
We thought it would be a good time to run some tests with apps from our updated benchmark suite (there are still more to come, too), running the gamut of one, two, three, and quad-core configurations to illustrate what multi-core CPUs really offer in 2009.”
