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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 4362080" data-attributes="member: 360">It's not really single-core vs. multi-core. For PC purposes, it's Pentium 4 (and Pentium 4 derivatives, like the dual-core Pentium Ds and the Celerons of the Pentium 4 era) vs. everything else. My desktop at work (which I'm using right now) is a 3.4 GHz Pentium D (dual-core Pentium 4). My notebook at home is a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo. In virtually any benchmark and in observed performance running the same applications, my notebook is faster.It really wasn't the software guys' fault. If the development path Intel started with the Pentium 4 had been successful in the long run, Intel would have stuck with it and AMD would have come up with something similar, and clock speed numbers would work going forward (and, really, the high clock speed / low instructions per clock type of design isn't dead; the Xbox 360, PS3, and IBM's POWER6 server CPUs work like that). If Intel had never bothered with the P4 (and covered the 'Pentium 4 era' by extending the Pentium 3's life a little longer and then making a desktop version of the Pentium M), then clock speed numbers would have been pretty comparable. But instead we had a bubble where the dominant CPU platform (at least in terms of sales -- and for a year or so in terms of performance) was very much out of sync with anything that came before or after it. It would have been silly, in 2002 or 2003, to write specs that weren't based on a Pentium 4 (and indeed, AMD's Athlon XP model numbers at the time -- no matter what they were supposed to stand for officially -- were intended to give some indication of which Pentium 4 to compare it against); that's what the vast majority of new desktops used.</blockquote>

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