True. Kind of begs the question of why they didn't bother putting in some extra cache since that new chip sure does cost some extra CASH.
The cost of on die cache (or even off die)is about the same cost as the transistors that make the chip themselves (still have to be taped out so no real difference between them).With the cost @ 250 a chip(guessing) and the chip now cost 700 a good markup will go a long way as when Feb. comes it will be marked down to 500 and all the other chips ASP will now be around the 35% margin levels.All told this averages to about 50-60% margins. Double the cache and your either talking a $1000 chip or squeezed margins. Xeon is where you have to go to really see the performance of HT. But with Athlon64 Hypertransport interconnects to main memory and 1 to 2 MB cache this is the future. That is why hyperthreading was rushed out the door.
Arrgggggggg! No virus scanning while you are running spread sheets. You run a normal virus scan for incoming e-mails in the background. As far as a full system scan you let the software schedule it while you're away, or at the end of the day, or on the weekend. And no, you really wouldn't have a 5x-10x increase in processing speeds with a dual processor setup in Windows. XP or otherwise. And it would not split the processor load between the two programs that way unless the software was written to instruct it to. And even then both software products would have to be written in that special way. You know, that (seemingly) impossible task of working together. You'd do better at faster operations with more RAM. But your theory does sound plausible, somewhere!
One of the best duallie sites is www.2cpu.com. Its the place to go to ask questions and research your setup before you plunk down your $ and find out something isn't going to work right. I have been happily using a Tyan Tiger MP, with 2 Athlon XP 1800's, 1GB Mushkin ECC DDR RAM and Radeon 8500 since the spring. Pretty standard setup for this board at that time. Most of my time (and a great source of stress) was spent finding RAM that would be compatible. Many dual CPU setups have quirks, so it takes a little more time to research what parts to get.
I disagree. The programs themselves don't decide what processor they run on -- the OS does. Windows XP would assign each program to whatever processor it determines. The virus-scan is just one example. If I wanted to convert a DVD to MPEG4 format in real-time, I would definately need another processor for other functions or else my system would just become unresponsive.
You must have missed that Multiprocessor Operating Systems 101 class. That's EXACTLY what any MP-enabled operating system (like Windows 2K/XP) does - and the software apps don't have to be written in any "special way" either. In fact, the whole process is completely transparent to the programs. It's simply the extension of the standard multiprogramming scheduling environment to use multiple processors if available. Now if a single program is to take advantage of internal parallelism and benefit from the additional CPUs of a multiprocessor environment, it needs to be multi-threaded (of course a multi-threaded program will still run on a single CPU box without change or being aware of how many CPUs are actually in the box). But if you had an 8-CPU box and started eight compute intensive programs, they'd ALL run simultaneously without anything special and without the programs even being aware of it or having to be coded any particular way.