Dual core chips allow for separate processing units on same PC

[jay gw]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, said on Monday it has begun shipping the first of a new generation of personal computer microprocessors that combine the power of two chips into one.

Intel's arch-rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., is preparing to introduce a similar chip next week, a person briefed on the company's plan has said.

The technology, called dual-core, allows two separate processing units to operate independently in a single PC, improving performance while multitasking. The transition, analysts have said, gives AMD a key opportunity to take business away from Intel, which commands more than 80 percent of the market.

Both Intel and AMD have moved aggressively to introduce dual-core chips across their entire product lines -- from chips for servers to desktops to notebooks. Both companies now appear set to begin selling dual-core chips within days of one another.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8146525&src=rss/technologyNews

[CBL4]

This does not sound very new to me. There already dual core processors in computers. The most frequent is to have a floating point processor. This sounds like two identical processors which would have less gain than specialized.

This is probably an overly pessimistic POV. It is a method to increase performance w/o speeding up the processor. I imagine it will much more difficult to handle sharing of duties than with specialize cores.

CBL

[Donks]

Nitpicking here, but... regarding the title of the thread, there have been dual processor PCs made. Long ago, math coprocessors allowed for "separate processing." And superscalar processors are not exactly new either.