Quad core Q6600 question

[hunterhunt]

4 x 2.4GHz

Does this mean i got 9.6GHz of CPU then, or only on some games that are capable of using quad core?
and 4.8GHz for games that use duel core...etc

Please reply and explai this whole thing please.

PS. Im not a noob, im just uninformed and confused :P

[Taxation]

simple answer
no

adding 2 engines to a car doesnt make it twice as fast
adding 4 engines to a car doesnt make it 4 times faster

the more cores you have, the better, more cores are better than a higher frequency

[hunterhunt]

how come?

4 cores at 2.4GHz clock speed each.....9.6GHz altogether?

[JDowdall]

yeah but like he said you can only get so fast, think of it this way, you have a ferrari which can go 4x as fast as a corsa but there are four corsa's depending on what you want one to do one will be written faster. In an ideal world where programs are written so they distribute a quarter of evry thread to every core your way of thinking would be correct, but programs are only just getting written as optimised for dual and quad core and even they arent balancing the loads equally

[hunterhunt]

So basically im correct

2.4GHz x 4 = 9.6GHz, but you dont think of it as 9.6GHz, you think of it as 2.4GHz per core that is shared equally (9.6GHz altogether)

Correct or incorrect?

[Taxation]

wait, lets put it this way

1 bugatti veyron
4 corsa's

get 20 people from one place to another
veyron can carry 2 people at a time
4 corsa's can carry 20 people collectively at a time

which will get all the people from one place to another the quickest??

[hunterhunt]

It would be more like

1 bugatti veyron (4x faster)
4 corsa's

get 20 people from one place to another
veyron can carry 5 people at a time
4 corsa's can carry 20 people collectively at a time

I understand what you mean though.

Data transferred between 4 cores to save time than 1 core to reduce time..

Is my theory above (last message) right also?

[JDowdall]

technically when looking at it from the simplest point of view but when you take into account stuff lyk latencies (on intel quads anyways as the 2 cores cant talk to the other 2) and the memory it works out at less than that

[hunterhunt]

but not much less?

Anyway, bottom line, Quad core is imba?

[Jonny2Bad]

Simply quads are faster than single core and dual core, they arent really being used to their full potential yet but they are faster than anything thing else right now!!

[jimb0678]

If there were a single core chip with 8Mb of L2 cache running at 9.6Ghz, the likelyhood is that it would not be as fast as the Q6600 in a multithreaded application; It would probably not be able to overclock (nor would it ever exist under the Core 2 architecture).