Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is a multi-threaded application? Would Photoshop fall under this catagory? Final Cut studio? What?
THink of cores as people with a calculator. Now think of the application as a manager. If he has 1 'core' to work with he needs only to delegate one set of instructions. When the calculator guy is done, he proceeds to the next task. All the work is done when all the calculations are complete.
Now add a second guy with a calculator. If the manager is smart, he'll give them both a calculation to do. The work will be done in half the time all things being equal. As the number of cores increase, the performance will only increase as the 'manager' (apllication) gets smarter and is 'trained' (programmed) to use these cores.
A multithreaded application is one with a well programmed 'manager' that delegates as many tasks as there are 'people' to do them.
With today's multi core chips and dual processor systems you can have 4 'guys with calculators' (soon 8 with the Clovertown 4 core chips). While some applications are written to provide multiple instructions others are not. In some cases the OS helps manage this, but few appls use more than 2 (I belive PSCS2 can use 4 cores for some, but not all prcesses so its performance depends on the task...thats why the dual 2.7G5 is faster than a quad 2.5). Those tend to be the high end, high price, resource intense apps. Final Cut Studio is one. Multiple cores also comes into play when you are doing multiple tasks with several resource intense applications.
