I don’t know much about computers, but years ago I’d always thought that the higher the GHz, the faster the speed. Today when I look at computer specs, the GHz is rarely mentioned, and even when it is, the Ghz isn’t usually any higher than it is on my computer I bought 4 years ago.
If a computer runs at 3 GHz but has 4 processing cores, does this mean it really runs at 12 GHz? Or what does this mean? And what specs are the most important in determining overall speed and performance?
No, not really. It could, maybe, under the right circumstances.
While I’m not an expert, the way I understand it is CPUs only do one thing at a time, so if two components in the PC want to do something at the same time, one of them has to wait for the CPU.
With a dual (or quad) core system the CPU can get both done at the same time as the requests come in. Oddly some of the single core processers got around this problem too, performing operations on the ‘up’ and ‘down’ voltage cycles.
So you’re only getting a performance gain when the different parts of the PC are high spec themselves and able to really ‘work’ the CPU. A PC always runs at the speed of it’s slowest component.
[size]Apologies for any terminology I got wrong, it’s been years since I’ve done any serious upgrades or research, and even longer since I’ve worked on building a system[/size]
Yes. It will. Until you install one of AMD’s new Molybdenum Alloy Quad-Core Processors[sup]tm[/sup], all of your people will continue to suffer from absymal aim while hunting elk and will eventually die of dysentery a mere 140 miles from the destination. 
My son’s a gamer. He built what he feels is a mercilessly screamingly fast machine for $ 825.00.
I respected his skill in chosing parts wisely. It’s the $ 150.00 Sennheiser white headsets with special elastic skull tension reducer bands and surround yer brain sound that kills me. :smack:
Cartooniverse
I think a good analogy to understand the difference between a uniprocessor(ie single-core) system and a multiprocessor(in our case, multi-core) would be a kitchen. The processor is the cook. What the processor manufacturers used to do is make the cook work faster and faster at making meals. Finally, though, they’ve hit the point where the cook can’t make a meal any faster. So now they’ve gone and put two cooks in the kitchen. Now the trick is, the recipe that these cooks are following has to be written to give both cooks something to do at the same time, or one cook will be standing around with nothing to do. The recipe has to be pretty explicit about that, too; the cooks aren’t smart enough to work out on their own that if one of them is chopping carrots, the other one can skip ahead and chop up the celery in the meantime; the writer of the recipe has to explicitly say somehow that both can/should be done at the same time. And for some recipes, having multiple cooks doesn’t help you at all: if one is stirring the pot while it simmers, the other one might not have anything to do, so the food can’t get cooked any faster.
Now, if there are several recipes that need to be made at once(say we’re in a restaurant), then each cook can go and work on a different meal. You could even have several cooks making the same recipe, only for different people. None of the meals will be completed any faster(if we measure that by the amount of time actually spent cooking the meal), but the kitchen can produce more meals per hour if it has more cooks. This is similar to what happens on a server like the SDMB – and multiprocessor systems were originally used by servers.
The lessons to take away from this are:
a) multi-core systems are faster when there are multiple things for the computer to do at once
b) computer programs must be explicitly written to tell the computer that there are things that can be done at the same time. Running an old program on one of these machines, even if there are lots of places where you could do many things at once, won’t be any faster if the program wasn’t written to take advantage of multi-core systems.
c) multi-core systems are no faster when only one thing needs to be done at the moment, and there are some programs where you can’t write so that several things can be done at once
d) systems where multiple programs will be run at the same time(or multiple requests will be made at the same time, like on a server) can really benefit from multiprocessor systems
It should be too hard for video game programmers make their games take advantage of multi-core systems. Each enemy, for instance, has its own AI, so you could have all of the enemies making their decisions at the same time on different processors. Right now, they’ll make decisions in order, only it happens so fast it looks like they’re all making decisions at the same time. Having more processor power available should allow programmers to use more sophisticated and intelligent AI, for one. There are lots of other places were they can take advantage of multi-core systems, I’m sure.