Conclusion

Check out the results! For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.

We also didn't want to overly embarrass the AMD by comparing the time it takes to install the OS vs. the old Mac. The Mac's average of about a minute is dwarfed by the approximately one hour install time of Windows XP Pro.
Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And that's just plain crazy.
Here's the link to the full article :  http://hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins

Conclusion

Check out the results! For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.

We also didn't want to overly embarrass the AMD by comparing the time it takes to install the OS vs. the old Mac. The Mac's average of about a minute is dwarfed by the approximately one hour install time of Windows XP Pro.
Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And that's just plain crazy.
Here's the link to the full article :  http://hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins

What a joke.. Irrelevant comparison and conclusion..

I bet the writer never heard of multitasking.

In addition to operating system (OS) support, adjustments to existing software are required to maximize utilization of the computing resources provided by multi-core processors. Also, the ability of multi-core processors to increase application performance depends on the use of multiple threads within applications. For example, most current (as of 2006) video games will run faster on a 3 GHz single-core processor than on a 2GHz dual-core processor (of the same core architecture), despite the dual-core theoretically having more processing power, because they are incapable of efficiently using more than one core at a time. The situation is improving: for example the American video game developer Valve Corporation have stated that they will use multi core optimizations for the next version of their Source engine, shipped with Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the next installment of their Half-Life franchise.[1][2] See Dynamic Acceleration Technology for the Santa Rosa platform for an example of a technique to improve single-thread performance on dual-core processors.

Integration of a multi-core chip drives production yields down and they are more difficult to manage thermally than lower-density single-chip designs. From an architectural point of view, ultimately, single CPU designs may make better use of the silicon surface area than multiprocessing cores, so a development commitment to this architecture may carry the risk of obsolescence. Finally, raw processing power is not the only constraint on system performance. Two processing cores sharing the same system bus and memory bandwidth limits the real-world performance advantage. If a single core is close to being memory bandwidth limited, going to dual-core might only give 30% to 70% improvement. If memory bandwidth is not a problem, a 90% improvement can be expected. It would be possible for an application that used 2 CPUs to end up running faster on one dual-core if communication between the CPUs was the limiting factor, which would count as more than 100% improvement.

I dont think the original author is trying to say that an 86 mac plus is better than a x2 4800+. Thats just stupid. What I do believe he'z trying to say is that the simple functions(eg. in word processing) that people use are still the same but due to the extra code added in the OS and programs etc, take longer now with newer comps. I noticed this myself while switching from a x2 3800+ 2GB system to a P3 500Mhz with 64MB ram. Sure the P3 had to be run with win98 and it could hardly run more than 2 programs at once but for simple tasks(like the ones mentioned here), I had about the same responsiveness from the P3 system as I had from my dual core rig. Just my 2 cents about this topic.

I dont think the original author is trying to say that an 86 mac plus is better than a x2 4800+. Thats just stupid. What I do believe he'z trying to say is that the simple functions(eg. in word processing) that people use are still the same but due to the extra code added in the OS and programs etc, take longer now with newer comps. I noticed this myself while switching from a x2 3800+ 2GB system to a P3 500Mhz with 64MB ram. Sure the P3 had to be run with win98 and it could hardly run more than 2 programs at once but for simple tasks(like the ones mentioned here), I had about the same responsiveness from the P3 system as I had from my dual core rig. Just my 2 cents about this topic.

firstly a dual core against a single core... well thats obvious. And secondly though dual cores might have a few disadvantages over a single core chip, still a vintage 1987 Mac is no where near a 4800+ if maybe there is a competition between p4 3.73 extreme edition and 4800+, then probably in certain ways, the amd would have lost.

Well i read about certain disadvantages of a dual core setup and in main points this is probably it
A thought to ponder.

1. Integration of a multi-core chip drives production yields down and
2. they are more difficult to manage thermally than lower-density single-chip designs.
3. From an architectural point of view, ultimately, single CPU designs may make better use of the silicon surface area than multiprocessing cores, so a development commitment to this architecture may carry the risk of obsolescence.
4. Finally, raw processing power is not the only constraint on system performance. Two processing cores sharing the same system bus and memory bandwidth limits the real-world performance advantage. If a single core is close to being memory bandwidth limited, going to dual-core might only give 30% to 70% improvement. If memory bandwidth is not a problem, a 90% improvement can be expected. It would be possible for an application that used 2 CPUs to end up running faster on one dual-core if communication between the CPUs was the limiting factor, which would count as more than 100% improvement.

There are many assumptions which are not clearly defined in the wikipedia article you quoted about multicores, i will number them as follows:

1. True if the size of each core in the multicore chip is the same as the single core chip. If you have a few smaller cores, this is not the case, and it may even be the opposite if you can disable one or more defective cores.

2. Completely wrong. Single cores are generally clocked higher, which means power/thermal density (W/mm²) is higher than say 2 similar cores clocked at half the speed.

3. How fast/wide can you make a single core? Especially for an ISA like x86? You get diminishing returns. Complexity tends to grow exponentially with the increase in speed/width.

4. I don't think memory bandwidth is a limitation in the vast majority of applications. L1 cache hit rates are >90% (>95% even i think) in modern CPUs. L2 will catch much of the rest. Only in certain massively streaming parallel processing applications will you be memory bandwidth limited, but then those tend to be processing heavy as well, so you are probably processing power limited before that.