We told you that there will be a lot of new laptops with dual core CPU support. But what is Dual Core CPU exactly? Well, first, imagine a pregnant woman. While most pregant woman only have one baby inside, on a special occasion they can have two, or even more twin babies inside. The processor technology we’re talking about goes like that.

Before the Dual Core CPU existed, we’re using a normal, single core, processor. This can be interpret as a normal pregnant woman with one baby. The Dual Core CPU itself is a pregnant woman with two twin babies, which (technically) mean, in one single IC package, we have two similar physical computer processor. The last one is the Multi Core CPU, a pregnant woman with more than two babies, or an IC package with more than two similar physical computer processors.

Tom Martinez and Sunish Marikh wrote an article named “Understanding Dual Processors, Hyper-Threading Technology, and Multi Core Systems” where they have a detail technical explanation about Dual Core CPU.

This term refers to integrated circuit (IC) chips that contain two complete physical computer processors (cores) in the same IC package. Typically, this means that two identical processors are manufactured so they reside side-by-side on the same die. It is also possible to (vertically) stack two separate processor die and place them in the same IC package. Each of the physical processor cores has its own resources (architectural state, registers, execution units, etc.). The multiple cores on-die may or may not share several layers of the on-die cache.

Furthermore, they explained what inside each physical processor.

A dual core processor design could provide for each physical processor to: 1) have its own on-die cache, or 2) it could provide for the on-die cache to be shared by the two processors, or 3) each processor could have a portion of on-die cache that is exclusive to a single processor and then have a portion of on-die cache that is shared between the two dual core processors. The two processors in a dual core package could have an on-die communication path between the processors so that putting snoops and requests out on the FSB is not necessary. Both processors must have a communication path to the computer system front-side bus.

On WikiPedia, there’s more brief explanation abot this.

A multi-core microprocessor is one which combines two or more independent processors into a single package, often a single integrated circuit (IC). Similarly, a dual-core device contains only two independent microprocessors. In general, multi-core microprocessors allow a computing device to exhibit some form of thread-level parallelism (TLP) without including multiple microprocessors in separate physical packages. This form of TLP is often known as chip-level multiprocessing, or CMP.

That’s it, a little hint about what a Dual Core CPU is. Of course there are more resources on the web about it, but we hope this little article can at least give you a light about Dual Core (and Multi Core) processors technology.

Btw, the price for a PC or laptop with dual core CPU support is still high right now. If you want this incredible technology on your machine, you’d better wait for a couple of month until the price dropped.