Imbibing Knowledge

Processors are tiny bits of silicon the size of a fingernail that do the grunt work inside your machine.

First came the single, then the dual-core and now Intel and AMD are promising four processors on a chip.

First things First do you remember Pentium 1, Pentium 2, Pentium 3 & Pentium -4?

How were they improving?

I remember, correct me if I am wrong that each new version had a higher clock speed, from 100 MHz to 200 to 800, then over to GHz and the processors went up to 4GHzs then suddenly Intel changed tracks and the next version was not 5GHz but 1.5 GHz dual core.

Why was this apparently slower (which it certainly is not) clock speed?

The faster a chip runs the hotter it gets, so the aim is to make a chip more powerful so it can run more slowly and therefore cooler. But that makes the chip bigger.

So you need to grow its performance but not its size - and that's a difficult trade off.

So our requirement is  to keep clock speed low, size small and performance high (especially with all those resource hungry applications).

If you want to extract higher performance from single core machine than the power requirement becomes abnormally high so the solution lies in the fact that to limit individual core power even reduce it but have multiple cores. This is exactly  what we mean by Core, Core Duo etc.