[Gllug] increase performance by increasing RAM or increasing in Core

Christopher Hunter cehunter at gb-x.org
Mon Feb 16 00:00:16 UTC 2009


On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 20:53 +0000, Diana Scott wrote:
> My linux box has 2Gb Ram in a Centrino at 1.7Ghz running ubuntu 8.10
> 32bit. If i were upgrade to the highest latest spec such as 4Gb Ram in
> a Dual Core processor running ubuntu 64 bit, what are the significant
> speed increases that can be easily noticeable apart from the speed of
> loading up programs ?
> 
> Would a Dual Core 1.7Ghz processor with a 2Gb Ram can be faster than a
> single Core processor with the same spec because the Dual Core has a
> double processing engine ? 
> 
> Please advise.

As usual in the computing world, the answer is "It might do...".  In
most instances, on an ordinary desktop machine, you're unlikely to see
significant speed increases.  However, some software is written to take
advantage of parallel processing, so you'd win there.

However, the biggest bottleneck in PCs these days is still the speed of
the RAM - it's often not much use having a processor running in the GHz
range when RAM can only be addressed in the MHz range.  Of course,
larger available RAM reduces the need for even slower hard disk access
(to and from those horrible "swap" files), so more RAM is generally a
good idea, though there is a law of diminishing returns when you get
above (perhaps) 4 Gb.

To be entirely honest, much of this high speed hardware is just so much
hype.  I find that there's little difference in accomplishing my
day-to-day computing tasks on a 1 GHz machine or one at 3 GHz.

Chris

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