So I was having a discussion with a friend the other day, I told him I overclocked my E8400 (Intel Core 2 Duo) to 3.83 GhZ. He argued that his Quad Core Processor still had a higher clock speed at 2.4 Ghz because he has 4 cores. He said that since he has 4 cores his clock speed is multiplied by 4. Meaning a total clock speed of 9.6 Ghz. Is this right? Or is the clock speed of a processor the same regardless of how many cores you have?

He is incorrect. He has 4 cores running at 2.4 Ghz which means his max is 2.4 Ghz
Having 4 cores only means you can run 4 programs with each of them running at 2.4 Ghz
You have 2 cores which means you can run two programs with each of the programs running at 3.83 Ghz
Clock speeds of each core does not stack (usually)

Thanks for clearing that up. I knew that 9.6 Ghz sounded stupid. You said usually though, is there an exception to this? What about a multi-threaded application?

That means the program can utilize multiple cores so it does things faster: like doing 2 calculations instead of 1 calculation.

In that case the clock speeds will "stack" - a 2.4 GHz quad core will perform better than a 3.0 GHz dual core - but not necessarily linearly. It depends on how the single application is able to utilize the multiple cores to speed up its execution. Especially right now, there are few programs that will fully utilize four cores. The biggest advantage to a quad core is being able to execute multiple high-intensity processes - like a high-res game and a DVD burner - at the same time.

lol, DVD burner? My DVD burning program mostly doesn't even use 1% on my cpu when burning a DVD.

Well, whatever the hell people run when they actually want two applications running at once

A high-res game and a virus scan, then

This is actually one of the main reasons Vista was made, because XP never could use multiple cores very well, Vista however is built to split work up between them and use their full capacity.

^ The speed will amount to be the same, because Windows Vista asks you questions like this when trying to run things:

"Are you sure you want to run this program? You know you should only run programs that you know are safe and that you have run before."
Yes.
"WINDOWS HAS DETECTED A FILE OPERATION. DID YOU START THIS, PITIFUL MORTAL?!"
Yes.
"Would you like the file operation to complete? You know you never finish these kinds of programs!"
Yes.
"WIndOws FIrewaLL has Detected YoU has Opened A PROGRAM!!! IT COULD BE FROM THE GOVERNMENT TRYING TO HACK INTO UR BRAIN! I WILL BLOCK IT FOR YOU!!!! DO YOU WANT ME TO UNBLOCK?!"
Unblock.
"WINDOWS HAS DETECTED A FILE OPERATION! NONE SHALL PASS MY EVERLIVING EYE!"
Let it pass.
(File operation requires creation of a new folder in My Documents)
"WINDOWS HAS DETECTED ANOTHER FILE OPERATION. I TIRE OF YOU, MERE MORTAL!"
It's okay, let it run.
"WINDOWS CANNOT ALLOW NON-MICROSOFT PROGRAMS TO CREATE NEW FOLDERS HERE, IT IS AGAINST TEH RULES."
Install at Desktop.
"You have alot of Items on your Desktop! You need to clean them up before you log off!"

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 10 2008, 4:08 am by The Great Yam.

Umm, I've been using Vista Home Premium for 80+ days now and I haven't seen one of those messages, ever.

Lol, he's obviously telling a taller tale than it really is, but I know that MS is stupid enough that is asks you twice when you attempt you start a program if you really want to run it, one to check that you know it's safe, and the second to make sure you're the one running it, which is quite retarded.

This happens all the time: I manually start an application that has a network service, and Windows Firewall tells me it has stopped a worm attack. Yes I want to unblock this application

I wonder who was the genius who thought a whitelist would work much better than a blacklist

Just about any firewall will likely require you to go into the configuration and explicitly set up rules to allow the communication to go through on the ports needed.


And Falkoner, as far as a firewall goes, a whitelist instead of blacklist is a GOOD thing. In reality, most firewall software supports a mix of either, though.