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The difference is that the Core Duo has a dual-core architecture, basically it can do almost twice the work per clock cycle. If you compared a Solo and a Duo at the same clock speed, the Duo would be about 60% faster. Definately, the Duo will be a better machine, performance-wise.

Being as when watching a DVD you aren't really doing anything else, I would be surprised if there was a huge difference.

Even the Core Solo supports Core Image.

QuickTime movies - definitely the Duo is better. 

Decoding DVDs?  Anything 500 MHz G4 or higher can do it in software.

i remember you.

The audio output quality on my PPC mini is pretty ropey. There is a constant hum, which turns into a scream when you minimize windows to the dock, or drag them around the screen. I got a Griffin iMic, which produces much cleaner sound.

tF

I'm obviously confused. I thought that a dual processor (two processors) only made a difference if the application was specifically written to take advantage of dual processors. Apps like Photoshop can make use of the two processors but standard apps like Office or most games can only use one processor at a time so there is no differece in performance for most applications. Now perhaps OS X can schedule two apps to run simultaneously, one on each processor, so that you could really "multitask" some process that takes a long time, but other than that a "Duo" seems like marketing speak for for most apps rather than a true performance boost.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong or out of date about this.

It really depends on the app.  Java that isn't threaded uses both cores as it runs the JIT and other house keeping stuff on one core and executes the code on the other.  Quite cute.  I suspect rosetta does something similar, so stuff that is non-universal will run substantially faster on the Duo than the Solo.

A lot of stuff is multi threaded, and even stuff that isn't will run ever so slightly faster due to stuff like less context switches between system calls, slightly improved interrupt handling and so on...  A lot of other stuff will be threaded, and it will only get more common in the future.  I think there is some value the second core.

Windows makes quite a fist of the whole dual core thing, but Mac OS does pretty well.  I think the second core is worth it, unless you have only really low end needs.

Spinner

Your computer has 2 processors, with a bus and cache for each. The core duo has essentially to processors, but they are both on the same die. For Intel's dual core processors, IIRC they share the same bus and cache. With the shared cache, that means that switching processes between cores is faster, but otherwise they only get half of the cache each. (I suppose that if only one core is really running, it gets the most cache, though) Theoretically, hough, dual core and dual processor are essentially the same thing, and the only difference is space.

There are no drawbacks to dual processors, except for more power consumption and expense. Overall, a 900 MHz processor would be faster, since more things can take advantage of one faster processor than multiple processors. If it were comparing, say, a 900 MHz processor and 2 700 MHz processors, it would be a little more difficult, as it would depend on what you're doing.

The problems of needing to lock threads is there whether you have multiple processors or not. It's more a symptom of threading and multiple things happening concurrently. (it's kind of a pseudo concurrency, but the results are the same, as you never know what point another thread is at, and you can really screw things up such as IO) Of course, if you're talking about choosing between taking advantage of multiple processors with multi-threading or by just having a single-threaded app, then yes, it does come into place. There are other reasons to choose threads, though.

Would a dual processor machine be ideal for say.... photoshop? What types of apps are dual processors designed for? I'm sorry if it sounds like I want the entire history of DPs but I find this topic VERY interesting.

Would it be advantageous to keep my G3 400Mhz around to run programs that don't like dual processors?