Intel Core 2 Duo; Two cpus?

I just recently bought an inspiron 1520 with an intel core 2 duo 1.66 ghz processor. I heard somewhere that the core 2 duo is actually 2 cpus working hand in hand, both at 1.66 ghz, is this true?

 

Yes, you have two processors each at 1.66 Ghz.

 

Only if the programs you are running can make use of dual core technology, and being realistic few do.. so for the most part you just have 1.66ghz.

 

Yes, it's technically true. And before you ask, no, that doesn't mean it's as fast as a 3.3GHz CPU.

A good analogy is cars. You've got two cars. Not one big truck, and not one super-fast car, but two cars each going at a decent speed.

Is that faster than having just a single car? Depends on what you do with them. If you and your girlfriend need to go different places at the same time, it's fast. You take a car each, and off you go. If, say, 8 people need to go somewhere together, it's also fast. You just load 4 people into each car and drive off.

But when you're just going shopping on your own, the second car is useless. Who's going to drive it?

Some applications are (more or less) able to take advantage of multiple CPU's. Games are trying to get there, with moderate success. (Most newer games get maybe a 20% performance boost from having two CPU's instead of one). And if you run multiple CPU-intensive applications at the same time, you'll also see a big performance improvement.

 

Yes and no. Very few have only one program open and running on their desktop.

The OS can schedule and distribute programs/processes on the multiple processors to more effectively utilize the CPU resources.

Programs that are multi-core aware see substantial performance gains.

 

Well its not like the old Pentium D where its basically 2 CPUs stuck together

 

True. On the other hand, even fewer use more than 10% of their CPU *in the first place*.

It doesn't really matter that you have 50 processes running on your system, if none of them need more than 0.1% of the CPU.

And that's the case 99.9% of the time, if you're not playing games or doing something else CPU-intensive. (And then you typically only have one application that uses more than 0.1% of the CPU)

 

Wow someone just crawled up from under the biggest rock in the world. Welcome to 2008 my friend.

 

Haha, agreed.

The Core 2 Duo processors have been one of the best innovations for laptops.

 

Technically, it's not 2 CPU's since a CPU is more than just a core. Core 2 Duo's have 2 cores, they are not 2 CPU's.

 

alright thank you everyone for your response...i know i'm fairly new to hardware stuff. i've been using computers my entire life and only now started to wonder how they worked. but thanks for the responses.