Dual core technology refers to two individual microprocessors on a single die cast chip. This is essentially two computer processing units (CPUs) in one. The advantage of a dual core chip is that tasks can be carried out in parallel streams, decreasing processing time. This is referred to as thread-level parallelism (TLP).

TLP is also possible on motherboards that can accommodate two separate CPU dies. When TLP is accomplished in a single CPU through dual core technology, it is called chip-level multiprocessing (CLM).

In dual core CPUs, each microprocessor generally has its own on-board cache, known as Level 1 (L1) cache. L1 cache significantly improves system performance, because it is much faster to access on-chip cache than to use random access memory (RAM). L1 cache is accessed at microprocessor speeds. (more…)