Dual Core PC or Not

[vinoj_kumar_s]

Hi,

I bought a Pentium 4, 3.06GHz system in November 2006. I did not know about how many cores it had until one fine day 3 months back I went to Device Manager and it said MultiProcessor PC & the Processors listed 2 Processors with the same speed.

Does my Pentium 4 (not Pentium D) 3.06GHz system have 2 cores? I want to know that without opening the computer. The label given to me with the processor was "Intel Inside Pentium". The vendor told that he need to check up my bill to find out what was dispatched to me. However the Processor costed Rs. 3300/- (About $77), he told me and Pentium D costed Rs. 4300/- (About $100).

I think I have a more advanced processor than Pentium D because of the speed where the Pentium D at my office ran at only 2.8 GHz. Cananyone shed some light on this.

Thanks, Regards,

Vinoj

[xorpd]

Since you seem to be running Windows, just hit -- to bring up Task Manager, select the Performance tab, and under CPU Usage History you should have one graph for a single core, HT disabled, two graphs for single core, HT enabled or dual core HT disabled, and four graphs for dual core, HT enabled. My guess is that you will get the abiguous case, two graphs.

Not to worry, just download this ZIP file, unzip it and run the two benchmarks, KMB_V0.53_MT_FPU.exe and KMB_V0.53_MT_SSE2.exe. A single core system with HT enabled should yield scores of about 180 and 320 million iterations per second respectively, whereas a dual core system with HT disabled should yield about 190 and 450 million iterations per second according to this table.

My guess is that you will find that you have a single core system with HT enabled. On this page it seems that processor number 524 is 3.06 GHz. Also Device Manager can tell you the family and model under the details tab for the processor.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

All "Pentium 4" models are single core. I agree with Xorpd that you have a single core processor with HyperThreading, which looks to the OS as a second processor but is really more like 15% of a processor. It does confuse Windows Task Manager, though - you'll never see the CPU usage go above 50% in the first "processor" window with HT on.