If you’ve been meaning to upgrade, you’d soon be confronted with the dilemma on whether to choose dual core or quad core. Is there a significant difference? Is it worth the price? Do you need it?

You can ask your resident techie who would only dazzle you with terms like cache coherency circuitry or simultaneous multithreading. Or you could ask your dad. He bought it, he thinks it’s better though he can’t give pinpoint why, and he recommends you buy one for yourself.

Let me first point out the obvious. Both are processors: a dual-core has two cores and a quad-core has four. A core is synonymous to a CPU or control-processing unit. And there are benefits and drawbacks to choosing one over the other.

Having a multi-core processor boosts multitasking. It isn’t a new concept. Several tasks — if run on the server — can be worked on by several processors enabling the system to function faster. Each processor handles a separate stream of data and as most users work on several applications at the same time, it makes sense to have more than one processor for enhanced performance. What Intel and AMD did was integrate multiple physical processors in one chip.

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