Dell PowerEdge 840 Xeon Quad-Core X3220 2.4GHz 2GB 2x250GB DVD±RW Tower Server w/Video & GbLAN

Question

Hello I am about to buy a tower server that has a Quad-Core 2.4 GHZ processor on it I was wondering what is the difference between the Dual Core and the Quad Core, I would think the quad core is better in performance is that true???  I wanted to make it a test server and put Windows Server 2008 R2 on it

is this processor faster then the i5 2310 2.90GHZ processor??

Answer 1

The number of cores has no influence on the running of Small Basic

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Jan [ WhTurner ] The Netherlands

Answer 2

Turner is right.

But to answer your question, a quad core is normaly better then a dual core. For example, we have a dual core processor with 1.0 GHz per core and a Quad core processot with 1.0 Ghz per core.

Result DualCore:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    2 * 1.0 Ghz = 2.0 Ghz

Result QuadCore:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  4 * 1.0 GHz = 4.0 Ghz

So, the quad core has 2.0 GHz more then the dual core and is that's why it is faster. But if you don't play big games, Is a dual core more then enough. You must look at the GHz. But it is more important, to have a good RAM (4-8 GB are nice). ;)

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Greetings Timo

Answer 3

thank you so much guys you defintely answered my question.

Answer 4

Hi Whturner33 can you explain what do you mean by Small Basic??

Answer 5

This is the Small Basic programming language forum (see info describing this forum) - so really you are way off topic here.

Answer 6

oh I apologize wont happen again.  Sorry about that

Answer 7

Turner is right.

But to answer your question, a quad core is normaly better then a dual core. For example, we have a dual core processor with 1.0 GHz per core and a Quad core processot with 1.0 Ghz per core.

Result DualCore:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    2 * 1.0 Ghz = 2.0 Ghz

Result QuadCore:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  4 * 1.0 GHz = 4.0 Ghz

So, the quad core has 2.0 GHz more then the dual core and is that's why it is faster. But if you don't play big games, Is a dual core more then enough. You must look at the GHz. But it is more important, to have a good RAM (4-8 GB are nice). ;)

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Greetings Timo

Frequency is by no means a measure of performance, and you do not multiply the frequency by the cores.

Cores, like frequency, are not something you can measure performance on. The only time you can consider more cores == more performance is when you are comparing processors using the same architecture. The same applies for frequency; you cannot use it to compare unless the processors are of the same architecture.

To answer your question, the difference is that there are two more physical cores. That allows for the potential for greater multitasking capabilities. It is likely a quad-core running 8 threads will complete the task faster than a dual-core running 8 threads, because there are more cores that can be running those threads. If a program tries to run more threads than are present on a processor, they have to be juggled so each gets a share of processor time. A dual core means that each core has to juggle four tasks, so each task will get less CPU time. A quad core means that each core only has to juggle two tasks, so each task gets more CPU time. However, depending on task, the number of cores will not be the limiting factor, it will be the architecture of the processor itself.

A good example of this is a comparison between the Intel Core i3-2100 and AMD's Bulldozer FX-8150. The former is a hyperthreaded dual-core from Intel (2 cores, 4 threads), and the latter is an 8-core from AMD. The i3 will near-match the AMD processor in every task, but the AMD will pull ahead in highly multi-threaded tasks because of the 8 threads.