Process

Intel Processor Comparison – Part 5 of 16

Every program that runs on your computer is basically a separate Process. Processes are independent running programs on your computer. They have their independent memory, variables, resources and they participate in competing for using the CPU time. Once you boot your PC, it runs several processes at the same time and once you have only one processor (on a single core computer) you will run only one Process at the same time.

One thread may want to run several parallel tasks at the same time. For example a sofware downloading a file may have one thread receiving data from network, another thread saving the downloaded data on the disk and another thread to display the download status on the screen. Threads use the common memory space and variables defined within a process and can talk to other threads within the same process. You can create threads without spending too much of memory or processing power while processes required significant resources to be spent when creating a new process. Last but not least, threads do not participate in the competition for using the CPU, rather whenever the process containing these threads executes, these threads get a chance to execute.

Threads can easily talk to the parent process and other threads within the same process. Processes can only talk to other processes through an external communication channel named IPC (Inter process communication).

Above description will help understanding the difference between the processors under discussion.

This article is part of a series of articles listed below

1. Intel Processor Comparison – Introduction
2. Want a faster PC, get more RAM first
3. Processor Flashback
4. Hyper Threading Technology
5. Difference between Thread and Process
6. Difference between Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad
7. Difference Between Core 2 Duo and Core i3
8. Difference Between Core 2 Quad and Core i5
9. Intel Turbo Boost Technology
10. Difference Between Core i3 and Core i5
11. Difference Between Core i5 and Core i7
12. Differences Between Core 2 and Core i Technologies
13. Difference Between FSB and DMI
14. Difference Between Smart Cache and L2 Cache
15. Processor Comparison Bottom Line
16. Processor Comparison Table