Dual Core vs Quad Core: Which is Better for me?

The main difference between Dual Core vs Quad Core, most laptops and computers now come with multi-core processors, although AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and Intel are the two chip makers leading this trend. Each company has its own terminology when it comes to naming their chips — Intel’s chips have numbers while AMD’s processor’s names tend to end in “phenom.”

Although there are differences between companies, most multi-core computers can handle basic applications at the same time so that your laptop will not have to choose between watching a movie or editing a photo when you’re running these processes on your computer.

This makes multi-core processors ideal for an everyday computing need such as work, keeping up with emails, surfing the web, and social media use.

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Processor

A laptop’s processor is typically one of the main components, and therefore an important part of your computer. It takes care of running applications on your device by figuring out all the instructions of each process you run – such as opening a document or playing a video.

The speed at which these calculations can be completed affects how quickly applications will finish running, so it’s always good to know that your high-performance processor can handle crunch time when you need it to.

Some applications require a certain amount of RAM in order to run properly. If you don’t have enough RAM installed on your computer, your application will run more slowly as a result. The more RAM that’s available to your machine, the greater number of various programs you’ll be able to run simultaneously (at the same time).

What is a core?

A processor has multiple different cores that do specific computational work. A quad-core processor can quickly handle more applications than a dual-core processor. Much like an actual processor, startups should strive to be as multichip as possible by using facets of your business’s offerings together while leveraging each one with the maximum of their potential.

Quad Core vs. Dual Core: Which is better?

It depends on what kind of applications you are running. If your application can split up the number-crunching required, then the higher the number of cores in your processor, the faster it will run.

Depending on the task that needs to be done using more than one program, a dual-core or quad-core processor can be used.

For example, if you are creating a presentation and have multiple programs open at the same time, only one core is needed to run them all. However, it will be best to use a quad-core since your computer is capable of running four programs instead of just two on a dual-core processor.

While most daily computing tasks won’t require more than 2 cores, as an entrepreneur, you know that you need to stay on your toes and multitask many different things throughout the day.

There will be time when multiple applications are running at once to accomplish this; however, if these software programs aren’t taking full advantage of a dual or quad core processor then there really isn’t much of a reason for having that much processing power.

Therefore, you should register for the simplest laptop with only 2 cores and therefore spend less money.

Do I need lots of cores or a faster CPU clock speed?

Great question, although most computers are now capable of running many applications at once using a number of processing cores, it’s actually important not to assume that more is always better when it comes to computational power.

In fact, you may have noticed that your current laptop or PC has been able to run programs just fine even though it only has a single core processor.

Which Software Takes Advantage of the Extra Cores?

Not all software programs utilize multiple cores. Only very few do, and typically only in specific instances.

It’s not that their cheap or broken software; It’s just a lot of people have computers without enough cores to take advantage of the programming.

Basic Tasks

As we mentioned before, basic tasks like website browsing, video watching and chatting do not take advantage of multiple CPUs.

If you plan on using all these applications at the same time (we recommend against this) there is an improvement in performance with a quad core CPU over a dual core but it isn’t significant. We’re able to use all of these apps without problems even if we have just two cores powering our devices.

Animation & 3D Modeling

Although you may need many cores if you’re working on software that is sensitive to core usage, otherwise in most cases the number of cores is irrelevant.

If money isn’t a big problem, then it goes without saying that a CPU should be paired with as many threads and at a high clock speed for optimal performance, but otherwise the number of threads isn’t really important.

From this list as far as I know only Revit and Inventor take advantage of multiple processing threads (cores).

• Auto-cad 3D
• Revit
• Inventor
• Civil 3D
• SolidWorks
• Maya
• 3DS Max
• Blender
• Cinema 4D
• Rhinoceros

However, when it comes to rendering your project with any of the applications above, all of them will benefit from more cores.

There will be a decrease in rendering times. As mentioned before, rendering is similar to a math problem and the increased number of cores you have means that you’ll get that computation done quicker than if you had fewer cores.

Video Editing

• Final Cut Pro
• Adobe Premiere
• Lightworks
• Sony Vegas Pro
• Corel Video Studio
• iMovie
• AVS Video Editor

Editing in general has always been a single threaded task. There won’t be any kind of significant boost to your workflow with any software shown above regardless of what kind of core you have installed in your computer, if you opt for 2 or 4 or 6 cores.

It’s actually the clock speed that will speed up how fast your programs can edit, Dual Core vs Quad Core and how fast you can apply special effects to videos and such.

However, rendering, encoding and previews do increase from a quad core processor and even a processor with 6 cores but no more than that (there’s almost no increase in performance past 6 cores).

All current laptops have come to the point where most of them now have 4 processors – the notable exception being Apple which still sells laptops with 3 processors; for MacBook’s however there are rumors circulating about upgrading their models to quad-core processors in 2013. If you’d like to see an increase in rendering, encoding and previews then opt for a laptop with 4 processors.

Image Editing

• Photo Shop
• Lightroom
• Core Paint Shop

Photo shop and other image editing programs will not see an increase in performance or speed if you decide to upgrade your computer from a dual core to a quad core, or octa core CPU.

Rather, applying effects and performing actions benefit more from the clock speed of the processor than than the number of cores contained within it.

There are a few effects in image editing software that do benefit from multiple cores. Most actions, however, are single threaded so you can safely opt for a dual core as long as it has more base frequency than a quad core.

Music Production

• Ableton
• FL Studio
• Logic Pro

By Music Production I don’t mean iTunes, windows media player or listening music from YouTube videos. A solid computer with the latest specifications means that the effects are applied in real-time and the audio quality is amazing, Dual Core vs Quad Core especially if you want to create your own tracks or contribute to your favorite songs.

Each channel or track can be assigned to a single core processor, although when it comes down to the digital base frequency you may find that your computer is struggling to play each one without skipping. If this happens then you’ll have trouble completing any mixes at all.

So, you should choose processors with the appropriate core frequency for the performance and quality of work required. If you can get multiple cores with higher digital base frequencies then by all means go for it; it’s worth the extra cost in terms of performance and output quality.

Programming

There’s in no way that multi-threading actually helps your programs. The base clock frequency is what matters most when it comes to faster program loading and emulation.

Instances are typically used to refer to the size of the user’s server. It is mandatory that you have at least one instance for your project and users can use it as cloud infrastructure code. But only if you plan on using several virtual applications on each VM.

For basic programming and development, a dual core is better, but if you will be working with virtual machines, then quad core CPUs are much more suitable.

Gaming

Game engines require synchronization. Because of this, Dual Core vs Quad Core it is necessary to finish the first action before starting the next one.

Even though gaming sites may claim that their game experience will improve FPS because of a certain software, it will most likely not be true.

Usually, the higher CPU speed clock speed will perform better no matter how many cores it has, but you can always check with specific game sites if something is different.

Recommendations

If you are not sure which laptops are ones to look at, I’ve gone over this in a separate post. In that post, I write the best dual core i5 laptops.