Technology

Two heads are better than one

Systems with two CPUs were once the preserve of high-end servers or workstations but dual processing has now been brought into the mainstream. That means lots more speed - but only for the applications built to use it.

01 June 2005

The idea of two CPUs on one piece of silicon is not new. Specialised signal processors have used dual cores for years, often in the form of an Acorn Risc Machines (ARM) processor for general purpose computing, combined with another processing unit for the specialised bits.

But in mid-2004, it became practical for the first time to manufacture high-end general purpose CPUs, which incorporated two copies of the CPU circuitry onto a single piece of silicon. The reason: shrinking transistor size.

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