Please help settle an argument...

My brother is 100% convinced that when running computer-straining programs or games like Oblivion and F.E.A.R, Core 2 Duo processors will only run with one core, leaving the other one idle to process another app, should the situation arise.
I think differently, in that both cores would be running to help maximize performance from the programs that are currently active.
So, which is it people?

 

only if the software if built to take advantage of both cores which most of the software available today is not capable of doing.

 

yea there aren't many multithreaded (?) apps out there....the other core does the background stuff leaving game-running core to do just that....

 

Your brother is quite correct. The majority of current games are not multithreaded, so are unable to directly take advantage of both cores in a Core Duo based system. The upside is that clock for clock, the Core Duo is ~10% faster than a Pentium-M and worlds away from any P4 based CPU.

For gaming, the Core Duo (desktop or notebook) is very hard to beat.

 

Yes like said most games arnt designed to take advantage of dual-core processors, so your brother is partially right. But on the other hand, Oblivion is one of those few games that are designed to take advantage of multi-core systems, so it will take advantage of both cores. I dont know about FEAR though.

 

Well shut my mouth. The little bastard was right for once. Thanks alot for the clarification guys, I appreciate it (even if I was totally off on this one).

 

you should still give him a wedgie just on principle.

make sure he knows who the alpha male is.

swirlies work well also.

 

LOL! Wedgies seem cruel, but I'll be sure to add a little something to his breakfast tomorrow...

 

ROFL. word.

 

Just to add more assurance to what everyone has already stated. I work with a home grown (rather lab grown ) software that is purely a number cruncher. It was developed as a single threaded software.

We did some testing the other day. The difference for a P4 and CD notebooks was expected, it was no where near 2x faster, but still it was a good improvement, and shows the efficiency of the CD design, clock for clock.

We then tested it on a quad core AMD opteron workstation (2.6GHz) the difference again was no where near 2x, but rather just the difference you'd expect from using a CD 2GHz compared to 2.6GHz CPU with comparable efficiency.

Now the software is being redeveloped to make use of the current improvements of multi-core, and in the future to be used on parallel computers.

 

Ooh, nice rig! Almost as good as the 8-way Opteron board by Tyan I've been lusting over... Up to 16 cores in a single box? Yum...

 

Well, the truth is that your brother was *almost* entirely correct.
(Where would we be if little brothers were right... Scary thought)

Anyway, yes, the game will only use one core at a time (although it may hop between the two cores quite frequently).
But other processes (all the ones in the background, that use 0-2% CPU) don't have to use the same core as the game. So they can run on the core that isn't running the game, which means it isn't idling 100% (But only maybe 98% ), and it means the core running the game may be able to do that 100% instead of the 98% it'd be able to do if it also had to run all the other processes).

Finally, modern graphics drivers are multithreaded so they can take advantage of multi-core systems. Again, it's not a big deal, but might be able to move a few percent of the workload to the other core.
But those are all minor details. On the whole, yes, one core will run the game, and the other won't.