Thinking of getting Quad

Hello,
I am thinking about get a new computer soon and have been debating whether
or not to go quad. I have read that quad doesn't really do a thing for ya
unless the app's you run take advantage of quad cores but I cannot find a
list anywhere that states what app's do Quad. Or even any info on a
particular software's web site. Does anyone know of such a list or at least
can tell me what app's they know of that do quad? I know adobe Photoshop is
one but what others?
TIA

* Eva:

> I am thinking about get a new computer soon and have been debating
> whether or not to go quad. I have read that quad doesn't really do a
> thing for ya unless the app's you run take advantage of quad cores but I
> cannot find a list anywhere that states what app's do Quad. Or even any
> info on a particular software's web site. Does anyone know of such a
> list or at least can tell me what app's they know of that do quad? I
> know adobe Photoshop is one but what others?

There is no such thing as software that "does quadcore". There are
applications that make use of multiple cores/CPUs (multithreaded
applications), and there are applications that don't make use of
multiple cores/CPUs but just utilize one core/CPU (singlethreaded
applications). You will find that indeed there are dozens of
multithreaded applications out there. However, if your applications are
multithreaded should be checked beforehand.

Usually you should first think about what you want to do with the
computer. If program X is multithreaded is just irrelevant if you can't
use this program for your tasks. Besides that, you should also be aware
that with a quadcore it's more likely that the shared FSB will become a
bottleneck.

Benjamin

Eva wrote:
> Hello,
> I am thinking about get a new computer soon and have been debating
> whether or not to go quad. I have read that quad doesn't really do a
> thing for ya unless the app's you run take advantage of quad cores but I
> cannot find a list anywhere that states what app's do Quad. Or even any
> info on a particular software's web site. Does anyone know of such a
> list or at least can tell me what app's they know of that do quad? I
> know adobe Photoshop is one but what others?


Each individual program doesn't have to be able to use all of your cores
for there to be an advantage to you. You can still make use of all your
cores if you run several different programs at the same time. Sometimes
some programs get stuck and use up all of your processor resources,
having another core or two will help you to continue working on other
things while this errant program fixes itself or if you like, you can
kill it off.

These days there's not much price difference between a two-core or a
four-core.

Yousuf Khan