The Year of the CPU

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While speeds have gone up and size has gone down for CPUs, no really big, innovative advances have been made in the technology...until this year. We will see two big advances: the move to 64-bit, and more importantly, the move to dual core. Jkabaseball ponders the changes, and what they will mean for PC users.

Over the past few years nothing big has happened in the advancement of CPUs. Yes, speeds went up and core size went down, but all that was the result of normal yearly operation. This year will be different.  We will see a few different evolutions for the CPU. The first is the advancement to 64-bit, and the major change will be the amount of cores on one chip. 

64-bit

While the AMD Athlon 64 has been out for a while, there hasn’t been a lot of consumer software that benefits from it. Yes, there are some flavors of Linux and other applications that make use of it, but for the home user, Windows and other home applications have been 32-bit.  Earlier this year Intel finally got around to launching 64-bit chips, and Microsoft’s Windows XP 64-bit is finally coming. 

Both Intel and Microsoft have been putting this off for way too long. XP 64-bit has been in the works for a long time. All of the drivers had to be rewritten. It appears that, when XP 64-bit is launched, many devices will have drivers.  Don’t count on many of your older devices to have a lot of 64-bit drivers any time soon.  Let’s hope some games will come out in 64-bit. I remember buying Far Cry; the company advertised that a 64-bit version was coming soon. Far Cry has come and gone in current news, and we're still a very far cry from seeing a 64-bit version. 

Dual Core

Dual core is just as it sounds; there are two physical cores on one chip. Both Intel and AMD have plans to release dual core CPUs very soon. This is what I’m going to talk about now. It looks like Intel will be the first introduce consumer dual core CPUs, so let’s start there.

Next: Intel's Dual Core Plans >>
 

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