How fast is each core in a dual-core processor?

"Each core runs at 2.4 GHz.

Though that doesn't mean that your system is twice as fast as a 2.4 GHz single-core system. Parallelism has (in principle) at most a linear speedup but in reality it's often much slower (though still faster than a single core)."

"To be perfectly clear, having multiple cores does NOT speed up any one program unless it was specifically designed for multi-threading.

The effect of having multiple cores is:

Each thread runs at most as fast as your core clock speed. And, parallel processing allows an application to run more than one thread at once.

This means that at most, your processing power will be double, but not on any one thread."