I recently purchased a Dell Precision 690 with two Quad Core Processors (2.66) and 4GB of RAM. I am running apps that previously ran at about 60% CPU Untilization on a two processor Pentium 4 Xeon with 2 GB of RAM. The new Quad Ccore 690 runs at about 2%. I have read in finacial industry technology magazine (Waters) that some office Apps, especially Excel calculations do benefit from Quad core processors. Very happy with the 690 so far (two months). I am running XP Pro with Service Pack 2 and Excel 2003. Just ordered another precision with a similar configuration. I agree with previous poster that commented that the increases in BUS speed are also important.
if you haven't been "auto-updating" all the security patches from Microsoft, your computer would work just fine. The SP3 probably just fixed some of the "quick-patches" that were not working well.
If I want to buy a laptop dual core which can be upgraded to Quad, does anyone have any input of which one I should buy?
Wouldn't count on that. Other than increasing RAM or hard drive size, notebooks don't usually take to "upgrading" too well.
But WOW, Trading platforms sure could !!! Again, most must be rewritten. There is one vendor who has built a set of C++ tools that enable the re-write process to be fairly easy.
What is your point? Wait 5 yrs? ...a multiple MAN-CENTURY endeavor !?!?! I use MultiCharts. It uses multi-core NOW. You can see the test results here. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1610998&highlight=result*#post1610998
I use NeoTicker because its multi threaded and i use Excel 2007 since it can utilize multi cores and higher amounts of ram than prior excel versions... <img src="http://www.enflow.com/p.gif">
I have had dual dual cores (so kinda like a quad core) on windows xp 64bit with 8 gigs of ram for a while now. I use TT which does supports and recommends multiple processors and also run a bunch of live updating excel spreadsheets. No charts on the machine. Performance was greatlly improved with this machine over what I had in the past which was a single dual core.
True. And right now you can go to NewEgg and buy the .45 nm, Duo-Core E8400 Wolfdale at 3.00 GHz with a 1333 FSB and a whopping L2 cache of 6 MB for a mere: $225.00