On 21-Aug-06 Richard Lewis wrote:
On Monday 21 August 2006 10:52, Adam Bower wrote:
On Sun, Aug 20, 2006 at 06:28:42PM +0100, Ian bell wrote:
PC World's latest TV advert has a saleman extolling the virtues of a dual core Pentium. Dual core? asks the customer. Yes, replies salesman, Let's you do more than one thing at a time.
At the very least misleading to the average punter. I have complained to the advertising standards authority.
Why? Technically it /does/ allow you to do more than one thing at a time (taken in the right context obviously) as you can execute 2 instructions at once (one on each core al-la smp) currently multi-tasking isn't /really/ multi-tasking as you are switching between things very fast so it appears you are doing more than one thing at a time. Granted it isn't the most technical of explanations,
I think the bloke says,
"It allows you to do two things at once, like, I dunno, downloading an email while you're uploading a tune."
"Cool", says the hip, young customer.
R.
I have to go along with Richard on this! Without being aware of the "like, I dunno, ... " followup (which wasn't quoted first time), it seemed clear to me that the "customer" is supposed to interpret "do more than one thing at a time" as "carry out more than one task at a time" where "task" is to be understood in the usual consumer's mindset of editing a Word doc, doing email, reading a website, etc., so "doing more than one thing at a time" is the likes of listening to streaming radio while writing a letter. The fact that a single core CPU at any one nano-second moment is involved in only one of these is beside the point for the general user.
As to the technical quibble that a dual-core processor does do "more than one thing at a time" by virtue of executing different CPU instructions simultaneously in its two cores, the only effect this would have on the user's perception is that things would appear to go that much faster, for the same nominal CPU speed.
If the 75MHz CPU on which I'm composing this mail were dual-core, I'd presumably get up to somewhere near the speed of a 150MHz single-core CPU. I could (and on another machine do) do much better than that by upgrading to a 733MHz single-core processor.
I still think that PCWorld are misrepresenting the matter by the clear suggestion (though not quite the assertion) that you *need* dual-core in order to multitask.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
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