International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology (IJCSIT) Vol 7, No 6, December 2015 DOI:10.5121/ijcsit.2015.7610 117 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SINGLE-CORE AND MULTI-CORE SYSTEMS Ogundairo Johnson 1 and Omosehinmi Dinyo 2 1 Department of Information Technology, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Enugu Campus, Enugu, Nigeria 2 Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria ABSTRACT Overall performance of computer systems are better investigated and evaluated when its various components are considered, components such as the hardware, software and firmware. The comparative analysis of single-core and multi-core systems was carried out using Intel Pentium G640T 2.4GHz dual- core, Intel Pentium IV 2.4GHz single-core and Intel Pentium IV 2.8GHz single-core systems. The approach method was using hi-tech benchmarking and stress testing software(s) to examine systems’ CPU and RAM for performance and stability. In all the tests, the components of dual-core had better rating when compared with single-core components; GFLOP result, and execution time for various processes rank G640T 2.4GHz dual-core above Pentium IV 2.4GHz and 2.8GHz single-core respectively. KEYWORDS FLOP, ILP, TLP, Multi-core, Single-core, Novabench & Linpack. 1. INTRODUCTION Operational advancements of microprocessors over the years were primarily due to speed (frequency) and parallelism increment [1] [2] [3] [13]. The addition of more transistors has led to other ways and/or techniques of increasing parallelism and improving performance [13]. Subsequently, architects then sought to increase parallelism by executing multiple instructions simultaneously (instruction-level parallelism or ILP) through pipelining techniques and superscalar architectures and to reduce the latency of accessing memory with ever larger on-chip caches. Microprocessors further increased ILP by implementing out-of-order execution engines that completed useful work instead of stalling on data and control dependencies [4]. It is now obvious that ILP increment, due to energy, heat and wire delay issues can no longer provide performance improvements that track Moore’s Law [5]. Therefore, vendors have shifted attention to exploring thread-level parallelism (TLP) by designing chips with multiple processors, otherwise known as Multi-core or Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). The implementation of high level TLP on multi-core(s) will continue to provide performance improvement while dealing with the traditional technology issues faced by single-core performance [4]. These new designs are referred to as multi-core processors because it has minimum of two execution cores with distinct execution pipelines, functional units and usually one level of private cache [24]. A Multi-core processor consists of two or more cores on a single die [6] [9] [26]. The cores of CMPs are essential components usually computation units and caches [6]. The individual cores on a multi-core processor don’t necessarily run as fast as the highest performing single-core processors, but they improve overall performance by handling more workloads in parallel [7] [8].