One of the biggest changes you will see in the computer market are the new dual and multi core chips.  For those that are not familiar with computer components, you might find yourself confused by exactly what a dual core or multi core chip exactly is.  For the most part dual core chips work similar to a conventional computer chip, except for the fact that there are now two chips on one motherboard. 

Dual core and multi core chips main selling point is that they offer three things, more power, less energy consumption and that they produce less heat.  For computer chips this is excellent news especially since high performance, single chip configurations have just about reached their peak in heat generation and are not that efficient when it comes to consuming energy.

Performance

Dual core chips put two fairly conventional computer chips on one motherboard.  While you won't exactly see double the computing power, you will notice that your computer will be able to multi task and handle double the threads in the same amount of time.  If you hit ctrl-alt and del keys all at one time and look at the amount of threads that are running simultaneously, you can imagine just how must faster and more efficient your computer will run with a dual core chip.

Multi core chips increase the motherboards configuration from 2 chips to 4, 8 or more in the near future.  While dual core chips are common in the market today, quad cores should be out very shortly making computing even more efficient.

Less Energy

The faster your computer's chip is the more energy it needs.  This is why many laptops can use up a battery in less than 2 hours.  Dual core and multi core chips save less energy, because in order to give you efficient speed and performance, they do not have to operate at max power.

Heat Generation

Most of today's single chip motherboards are extremely inefficient.  Just like a standard light bulb wastes 90% of energy creating heat, computers also waste an enormous amount of energy transferring possible performance into heat that can make computing less reliable and energy inefficient.  Dual core and multi core chips can lower the performance of chips on the motherboard to make them run more efficiently equaling higher performance for the user.