Confused on processors
Can someone please explain in normal words how the mabooks work. Freind of mine has a Core Duo MacBook. I have a Core 2 Duo Macbook. She claims to tell me that there are two chips,"sidebyside" powering her laptop. And she says my C2D is "basically the same". I agree with her that there wasnt huge changes, but is she right? And if she is, what is Dual core, the same thign? I always though there was one processor that had two cores. So does a 4 core computer have 4 processors? If someone could please clean this up for me, I would be very gratefull. Shes also an Apple Rep for a major university. 
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Can someone please explain in normal words how the mabooks work. Freind of mine has a Core Duo MacBook. I have a Core 2 Duo Macbook. She claims to tell me that there are two chips,"sidebyside" powering her laptop. And she says my C2D is "basically the same". I agree with her that there wasnt huge changes, but is she right? And if she is, what is Dual core, the same thign? I always though there was one processor that had two cores. So does a 4 core computer have 4 processors? If someone could please clean this up for me, I would be very gratefull. Shes also an Apple Rep for a major university.
Core Duo and Core 2 Duo both have two cores but only one physical processor. Core 2 Duo is the second revision of the chip.
Sometimes the marketing Apple uses is confusing because they will say the quad towers are quad core. That's true in so much that they have 4 cores total but they actually have two physical processors with 2 cores each. If they had the Core 2 CPUs instead of Xeons, they'd have dual Core 2 Duo.
The upcoming Intel CPUs have 4 cores per chip and if the Mac Pro gets them, it will have dual Core 2 quad but Apple will call it an 8 core machine.
She claims to tell me that there are two chips,"sidebyside" powering her laptop. And she says my C2D is "basically the same". I agree with her that there wasnt huge changes, but is she right?
Here goes:
There are not two chips side by side powering her laptop. There is one chip, that looks like this from the outside:
underneath that raised rectangle in the middle is the piece of silicon that has on it all the transistors that make a processor what it is. And that single piece of silicon has two "cores" on it, so to the operating system, the single chip is two processors.
When your friend says that the C2D is "basically the same" she is right in that the external appearance is similar and both have the same "two cores on one piece of silicon" design. However, that's where the similarity stops, because the C2D was a major update of Intel's processors.
Here's the confusing part: Intel did themselves no favours whatsoever with the marketing names given to their processors. Remember hearing about the "Core" Micro-architecture and how fabulous it is? Well, the Core Duo processor is not based on the "Core" Micro-architecture! The Core Duo is actually just a dual-core Pentium-M with minor enhancements, and the Core 2 Duo was the first chip that was based on Intel's "Core" Micro-architecture.
Follow these links to learn more about the Pentium-M, Mobile Core Duo (Yonah) and Mobile Core 2 Duo (Merom).
So then what's the difference between a Core and a physical processor?
An easier but equivalent question is - what is the difference between two single-core processors (like the dual G5) and one dual-core processor?
In the new terminology, "core" just means a CPU, or processor.
In a dual-core, both processors are built into the same physical chip, so they share the same frontside bus to connect to the memory. Only in extremely demanding throughput applications would this have any detrimental effect. However, in the dual G5, each processor is on its own chip and has its own dedicated bus to the memory.
Note that both of these are true dual-processor configurations, and not at all the same as the "hyperthreading" seen in previous Intel Pentium chips.