posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 4:10 PM
by
Endie
Oh, that's nice...
I've always been impressed by how fast my PC is. I got it from Dell almost three years ago, now, and I remember thinking that I was being excessive in specifying a 2.8GHz P4 procesor, since the price jumps from the 2.4 and 2.6 chips were so steep. Nonetheless, it has never been close to choking on any software I run, whether that was multiple instances of compilers or games software.
One annoyance was that the task manager performance bars always insisted on showing two processor activity graphs. No biggy, but a bit of a pest: I dislike the system thinking it has the wrong number of processors in it. Windows has, historically, had problems with hardware "duplicating" itself, and appearing multiple times in Device Manager et al...
Turns out the system was right.
I got interested again, today, and started taking a closer look. Device manager, on closer inspection, told me I had two 3GHz P4s running. The graphs of processor activity were, when I ran a Defender scan and a compile* markedly different in their charting. I opened up the box, and sure enough: there they were.
Dell is generous with their special offers, but I very much doubt that they sent me two processors worth (at the time) 600 dollars each on a multiprocessor board on purpose. I just hope that someone, somewhere isn't just now opening up that super-whizzy dual-processor computer that never really seemed that great and hunting around in vain for a second CPU...
It is a mark of great shame for me that I never noticed this before. Time was I knew my spare IRQ lines off by heart. Plug and Play has made me lazy.
*The compile, by the way, was of the final version of my first game since using BBC Basic: a version of Tetris in C# using DirectX 9. Everyone said Tetris is the game to start off with for collision detection routines, so Tetris it was. It certainly makes a difference from the AJAX and server-side javascript stuff we're doing in work right now. My Tetris works, and looks ok-ish, but it feels somehow, subtly wrong. I don't know why: it does everything Tetris is supposed to do, and some I think it should (bigger points for clearing multiple lines at once). It just seems, somehow, jarring.