What is "low spec" for you?

[Clinton Morse]

That's really the root of my question - most of the cited benchmarks are 
based on PC gaming under WinDoze so the game software explicitly needs 
to be programmed to utilize mutliple cores efficiently.

But linux is a multi-threaded OS so in theory the operating system 
should be parcelling tasks out to the individual cores, especially where 
there is a clear division such as when running something like Ardour or 
Rosegarden while also running softsynths and/or plug-in effects.  It 
seems to me that linux OS would gain the advantage of multicore 
processors without 'special programming' at the application level, 
whereas windows (where most of the benchmarks are conducted) does not.

Asmo Koskinen wrote:
> "For example, most current (as of 2006) PC games will run faster on a 3
> GHz single-core processor than on a 2GHz dual-core processor (of the 
> same core architecture),[citation needed] despite the dual-core 
> theoretically having more processing power, because they are incapable 
> of efficiently using more than one core at a time."
>
>