Hey all. I've got a laptop which has a core duo processor of 1.66GHz. Does this mean that the actual total speed of the processor is 3.32GHz, with the duo meaning pair? (1.66GHz X 2 = 3.32GHz)
No the speed of the PC is 1.66GHz; it just means that there are 2 cores to do what one was doing before. So basically you get the load spread over the cores to reduce load on each one. I.E if you ran a video through the PC at 1.66GHz it might take 20 minutes to process; if you run it at 3.2GHz it might be almost halved. There are some multithreaded applications that are written to utilize the capabilities of duals core technology, so they use both cores to do the same thing, this will almost act as a doubling of speed but not exactly.
It's still a top CPU in a very good spec laptop. My laptop is just a Centrino 1.6 with 1.25GB RAM which was good when bought.