Processor Speed Question?

No, the speeds do not add up. They work in parallel, which they can multitask more easily.

It's like 2 cars racing down a road. They both travel at 1.66 ghz, but that doesn't mean they go any faster than 1 car doing the same speed.

Certain programs have been written so that their tasks are split (called multithreaded processes) which takes advantage of dual core processors. However, the processor is still slower when it comes to older programs that were written before the dual cores cores were introduced. There are also lots of programs that do not yet support dual core yet, so even single cores can sometimes outperform dual cores.

e.g a game produced in 2005 would run better on a single core 2.4 ghz than a dual core 1.8 ghz.

see http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=16...

No it does not. The Cores are faster than Core 1 models but they'll be used asyncronously.

2 1.67GHz processors at the same time, think of it as that. It can use BOTH but not add their speeds together.

You have a dual core, with asynchronous speeds as a previous answerer has stated. their answer hits it right on the head.

theoretically it could process data at that maximum output