By Desire Athow
The Xeon with a secret
In the history of processing power, faster didn’t always quench the need for speed which is why multi-threading, multi-core and multi-socket solutions were introduced, first at the very top-end of the market and more recently to consumers.
Having more of everything does help to speed up performance even if it’s not always a ‘linear’ boost (i.e. adding two processors doesn’t automatically double the speed).
More often than not, it depends on other factors like the operating system (how well does it support multi-threading/multi-core?) and the applications that will use that raw firepower (can they take advantage of more than one core?).
Keeping many cores unused is a bit like under-using a powerful jet engine: even idling, it still consumes a lot of fuel.
Most computers (and almost all laptops) have processors with two cores (for the sake of simplicity we won’t talk about smaller/less powerful Atom-based devices, or those based on ARM chips).
Unfortunately, while computers with one physical processor are relatively cheap, those with two are a rather expensive outlay and are usually limited to servers and workstations.
However, at the end of last year, something happened; one or more cloud …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components