I was told recently that if you are running a dual core cpu, the two cores can come out of sync with each other, causing all sorts of weird problems on a pc. It seems that AMD dual cores have an optimizer, is there one for a pentium4?

The P4 is a single core CPU.

Smp is well understood. There was an issue with some amd's that should now be fixed. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

A hyper-threading CPU like the P4 is not the same as a dual-core CPU. HT tricks the operating system into thinking that there are two engines under the hood, but on the P4, it's more like having 1.05-1.25 cores instead of 2. And that's ONLY when you're running an application that's smart enough to send certain instructions through the floating point/SSE2 unit and another stream through the general ALUs at the same time. If the app doesn't use HT properly, you lose a tiny bit of performance. With a true dual-core CPU, you'd never have to give up single-threaded performance by running a single- or poorly-threaded program. "the two cores can come out of sync with each other, causing all sorts of weird problems on a pc." That's news to me. I've never trusted software "optimizers". They usually just make things worse. I've used dual-core CPUs (AMD and Intel) for years and have never had to install CPU optimizers. A few older games have required me to disable a core through Windows in order to run at the proper speed, but that's about it. .