Dual Core Processor

Until recently, the way to improve performance of a CPU was to clock it faster and faster. But now a limit has been reached because of the sheer amount of heat a fast clock creates within the chip.

So now the chip companies are using a different approach - to include more than one CPU core within the same chip. Effectively a 'dual' core is two computers built into one device.

The downside of multi-core chips is that whatever software is running has to make full use of the cores - and right now, there isn't much software around that does that.

2020-10