[ALUG] PC World TV Advert

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 17:58 +0100, Ian bell wrote:

> My view too because of all the possible ways to answer the question 
> 'What's dual core?' they chose not 'it goes twice as fast as a single 
> core' nor 'you get the same computing power for less electrical power' 
> both of which are pretty much unique properties of dual core, they 
> gave an answer which a) is not unique to dual core b) implies it does 
> something new all of which seems to me to persuade the customer to buy 
> it for erroneous reasons which makes it misleading in my book.
> 

Ahh but this highlights the problem with bringing down technical facts
to a level that anybody can understand, they are then two easy to
misinterpret.

Both of the alternatives you provide can be misleading and in some ways
they could be interpreted are as (if not more) factually incorrect.

'it goes twice as fast as a single core'

It doesn't if you are running one task that doesn't thread very
well..even if it did you are sharing common I/O and resources so overall
performance will not be twice as fast.

'you get the same computing power for less electrical power'

This is sort of tied in to the first statement and fails for the same
reasons. A single faster core will give you more computing power in some
instances. Theoretically two slower cores could be better than one
single core that is twice as fast, in reality it rarely actually works
out that way. A dual core CPU draws more power than a single of the same
clock speed and maybe more than one of higher performance.

A better was PC World could have put it would be to change "it allows"
to "it Helps".