Am preparing to acquire a laptop but unsure of my selection capability.
Both machines are Toshiba one has a 2020M dual core Pentium processor running at 2.4GHz. and the other has an AMD A4-5000 running at 1.5GHz.
Slackware runs SMP and am not sure the quad core A4-5000 would be faster or not. I've always bought on processor speed as there are few applications running more than single core so have been told to go with speed. Would that be true for SMP OS?

The Linux kernel in Slackware supports multi processor since roughly version 13:
All other consideration being equal, I always go with the bigger clock cycle number, unless the laptops case is red because, as everyone knows, the red ones go faster.

amd one uses less power (15W to 35W), has more extensions and an integrated gpu
intel one i assume should be faster for single cpu things

firefox kinda uses multiple cpu's
much everything else you won't notice the difference, unless you plan to run something like a heavy DE

also from what i see the amd one has better power saving, not enough info to be sure thou

disclaimer: i like amd more even thou intel ones are usually better (until these new generations intel were)

Personally, I have never seen much gain in smp. Oh, I see that tasks switch from one cpu to another, but (and I stress this is my _personal_ experience) that is mostly what it does - shuffling the same task between different cpu's. Looks impressive, I'll admit, but as for actual gain - I'm more doubtful.

I have had computers with 48 cores and exposing them to some heavy data crunching - at the end of the day, 30 of those cores are never used!

Just my 2c-worth ...
So - much as I admire AMD, I'd go with the faster one unless power-consumption is an issue ... (AMD tend to be a lot leaner in this department)

Multi-core becomes valuable when running more than one application that makes heavy use of clock cycles or when multiple processes are sending interrupts to the processor in quick succession. I'm told you can code to take advantage of multi-core but that's well beyond my skill set.

if i remember correctly; the scheduler tends to move things around in those cases to reduce wear on one core and thermal.. how you call it.. stress
you can pin it to one cpu, but no need to

@dijetlo
sometimes it helps while for the most part it doesn't
if the program is mostly sequential logic then it can't be parallelised, like a window manager
while something like firefox that does good few things independent, decoding multiple pictures at once for example, can benefit some (from a couple cores, not so much on 4)

dota2, from what i see, runs on ~4 cores but only one is maxed out (i'm guessing the one that deals with opengl)

When you run Slackware, you do a lot of compiling from source, and these compile operations can be set to take advantage of as many cores that you have.

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Thank you Dugan!
You just got bookmarked

Make, which is often called by SlackBuilds, has a "-j" flag that specifies the number of parallel processes Make should run. As a rule, you want to set it to one more than the number of CPUs that Linux thinks you have.

Pat's SlackBuilds (in source/) are hardcoded to use "-j7". Of course, you can edit the SlackBuilds before running them.

For other SlackBuilds, you can set the following in ~/.bashrc, in /etc/sbopkg/sbopkg.conf, and other places as appropriate:

Where the number after the -j is one more than the number of CPUs that Linux thinks you have. Or, again, you can edit the SlackBuilds before running them.

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You mean MAKEFLAGS. MAKEOPTS only exists on Planet Gentoo.

Although many packages' build systems work with -j >1, there are a lot of them that don't. Some SBo SlackBuilds for packages that *must* have -j1 explicitly say 'make -j1', but there are plenty more that need -j1 and don't set it. If your build dies with a mysterious Error 1 or Error 2 or linking error or can't find a file, you've angered the gods of parallelism.

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To make sure I have this correctly, the virtualized core systemdistro is optimized on a 6 core hardware emulation and installing without changing our Beloved Dictator for Lifes configuration switches. However any packages added outside of the official distro will probably need to have the 'MAKEFLAGS=' -j7 ' configure option explicitly set, unless they expressly say otherwise or fail to successfully build in which case reset the MAKEFLAGS=" -J--something less than seven " until you get a successful build?

-jn is a `make` flag, the kernel has nothing to do with it ( man make )
it does not change nothing except how many threads (processes to be more precise) are used to compile something

and yes, some programs will not build when tried in parallel so globally exporting it can cause problems in the future

putting -j over the number of cores will bring no tangible benefit

Thanks.

The words laptop / netbook and power do not belong in the same sentence. Instead focus on the overheating issue, which is by far the biggest problem with these devices (don't take my word for it search the internet and this forum). Personally, I am never buying a powerful laptop again. I'll stick to Atom-based netbooks if they continue to exist, preferably with intel onboard graphics because graphics cards also overheat easily. If you get an optimus one, make sure you can disable the nvidia card.

Linux works best on multi-core CPUs and can be easily optimized for them. In short the the more cores you have for a Linux box, the better. The CPU speed really doesn't matter that much as Linux distributions are not as resource heavy as Windows. 1.5GHz w/ 4 Cores will honestly do more work what a 2.4GHz with 2 Cores.

The only place you might see a drop in speed is possibly high resolution heavy OpenGL gaming and video file encoding and decoding. If you do neither of these, then don't even worry about it.