Single-Core 3 GHz, or Dual-Core 2 GHz?

Dual Core is hardly utillized at all, but software companies are beginning to make the switch. Eventually singles cores will be obsolete and their initial speed will not be a deciding factor. But for a few years you should be beyond fine with the one core processor.

I can’t answer that, but maybe I can add a useful question.

Individual applications do not take advantage, but do dual-core PCs multi-task better? Can dual core PCs run multiple applications faster than singles?

There’s one vital advantage to the dual-core. With 2 CPUs at your disposal, if an aplication runs awry and starts using up all the processor’s cycles, you can shut it down without a full system crash because there is a second CPU sitting there to manage failing gracefully.

Now there is a much better argument to be made about whether the quad-core buys much performance over the dual-core in desktop applications not really designed for it. In many benchmark tests, the two perform neck and neck. But in others, the quad-core is as much as 1.9 times faster. So I’m running a quad core and happy with it.

If you play games, get a dual core – modern games employ multi-threading – using more than one core for different processes within the game. Some applications also do the same thing.

For most purposes, a single-core CPU should be sufficient. The biggest bottleneck on any modern computer system is the hard drive.

No, this isn’t for games. It’s to become Linux web server. I’m planning to develop a web site and use it to host the site. Amongst the CPU options, I can choose either a 3 GHz Single-Core, or a 2 GHz Dual-Core for the same price. And I don’t know which is the better choice since the price is the same. For my personal computing needs I use a laptop with XP. And for gaming, I have an Xbox and a Playstation. Keeping a gaming PC current is hideously expensive!

For a web server, the ability to shut down a CGI that’s tried to divide by zero without interrupting web services is vital. Go with the dual core even if you can’t afford to get the extra clock speed.

Most of the stuff I do is stuff that either is coded to multi-thread and therefore goes faster on a 2GHz dual-core than on a 3GHz single-core or is stuff that could be done perfectly fine on a 300MHz single-core.

Now that there is so much software that actually can/does use multiple cores, you are generally better off sacrificing clockspeed for actual computing speed, so go with the dual-core.

@the100thmonkey I transcode audio and video files quite a bit and that involves a lot of number-crunching; something that dual-cores do better at.

Web server? Nobody will ever notice the difference. If the price is the same, go dual core. Either way you will be OK.

@jaytkay End users would definitely notice the difference if a process went into a continuous loop and the HTTP connection dropped, not to return till a watchdog timer notices it and reboots (if you have one) or a human admin reboots if you don’t. The Dual Core can shut down a rouge process in one core running in the remaining core to do it. To me, for a Web server, dual core is a no-brainer.

@ETpro If I were running Amazon or eBay or a banking site, I guess I would worry about things like that. For small sites, isn’t that unlikely?

Thanks! Dual-core it is!

BTW, it’s going to be a small-time dating site. Nothing major like Amazon or eBay (unless I get really lucky)...

Make it a social dating site where you have to expand your farm by going on dates and it’ll probably be a blockbuster.

@mrentropy That’s actually a great idea. If you can distill down the most compelling social aspects of things like Fluther, the Old Answerbag, Digg, Facebook and Twitter and roll those into a dating environment, that would be a dynamite site.

@ETpro True, but it would lead to other issues. The old AB led to the new AB and Twitter, while popular, should only be rolled into a paper and smoked.

@jerv You’d need to develop it with very deliberate consideration of effiiency, database access, HTTP calls, CPU cycles and optimization. But since a good deal of the social interaction will occur in the real world and not online, those should be manageable issues.

@ETpro The hardware is pretty easy, the software is manageable by the right people, but the wetware will screw things up every time, if not immediately then at some point down the road.

@jerv It is what it is, man. When the end object is to get people laid, there’s gotta be some slippery wetware involved.

All about dual core!! Multi-core is the thing of the forseeable future. Now they are going into 8 or more cores in the more advanced machines. Taking the load off of 1 cpu core helps the machine and is way more efficient when going to 64 bit processing.

@mrentropy & @ETpro & @jerv – Yes, that’s actually what I have in mind. I plan to take the social aspects from the old AB and incorporate them into a dating site rather than a Q&A site. But it’s all the chit-chat that overwhelmed their server when they grew to gazillions of ABusers. But AB also made a big mistake when they replaced their lean HTML & text interface with graphics all over the place (look at Fluther…they have a very attractive layout here, but very few graphics…just a banner at the top and some orange fishes here and there)! I don’t plan to make that mistake! I also don’t expect my hobbyist site to grow into another AB, but CPU power and code efficiency is a concern. I don’t really want to say to much more until the site goes live…

@HungryGuy I agree about the look and the bloat.
You may also consider looking into various types of RAID to both ensure data safety and to decrease seek times and throughput on data. Maybe SSDs would be a reasonable investment as well, depending on how the prices go.
Also be aware that Linux is generally better at multi-threading than Windows. Linux has been doing it pretty much from the beginning, and there is a reason that most of your multi-CPU cluster supercomputers run on penguin-power. I don’t think you can really get much more efficient than Linux.

@jerv – Right. I’ve already settled on Ubuntu Desktop as my development OS, LAMP as my development environment, and Ubuntu Server as my server OS :-)

Penguin Power all the way, baby!