How many cores?
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From: LSMFT on 19 May 2010 08:02 If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3, 4, 7 or what? -- LSMFT I haven't spoken to my wife in 18 months. I don't like to interrupt her.
From: TVeblen on 19 May 2010 08:39 On 5/19/2010 8:02 AM, LSMFT wrote: > If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores > are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3, > 4, 7 or what? This is like me asking: "I'm buying a new car. How many horsepower do I need?" (Answer: As many as freakin possible!! ;-) In the future, most programs will be written that take advantage of multiple processors and they will run better and faster. If you have some of these programs now you will benefit from a multi-core processor system. Windows 7 uses multiple processors. Many of the newer games can use them. But many of the programs available today do not take advantage of multiple processors and you will see no improvement in performance. You would get more bang for the buck from faster HDDs, more and better memory, or better graphics card. But if you, like me, believe in "future proofing" your builds, then a multi-core processor system will be functionally viable further into the future than older technology and you will not need to replace the system as soon due to obsolescence. If you replace your system every few years anyway, there would be far less need to "future-proof" and you could save money by using "current standard" parts.
From: John Doe on 19 May 2010 09:29 TVeblen <Killtherobots hal.net> wrote: > LSMFT wrote: >> If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how >> many cores are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or >> should I go for 3, 4, 7 or what? > > > This is like me asking: "I'm buying a new car. How many > horsepower do I need?" (Answer: As many as freakin possible!! > ;-) The real answer is a question "What do you need the car for?" Nobody can tell you what is adequate without knowing your applications. And IMO the best place to find out how much power you need is in the groups that run the applications you plan to run.
From: Paul on 19 May 2010 12:01 LSMFT wrote: > If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores > are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3, > 4, 7 or what? If you grossly mismatch the processor to the set of tasks, what you're doing is wasting electricity on the cores that aren't being used. If the machine was for email, Microsoft Office, web surfing, you could easily get away with a high clock rate dual core. If you always have a DVD Shrink running in the background, do video editing, process large Photoshop posters, perhaps a quad would make more sense. For gaming, core loading tends to be asymmetric. Usually one thread of execution is running one core at 100%, while the other cores are loaded to 30%. You might see a 100-30-30-30 loading pattern on a quad. So the quad doesn't run games four times as fast. Balancing the threads of execution is difficult. Changing a program from a single thread of execution, to multiple threads, is difficult enough. Changing it to run on an arbitrary number of cores, efficiently, is even more difficult. To give an example, Excel has added to it, the ability to compute on more than one core. But the list of exception cases, things that can't be run in parallel, is as long as your arm. Photoshop filters are divided into two sets. One set runs on a single core. The other set runs on multiple cores. It is unclear what the upper limit on cores is. Not all Photoshop operations, as a result, get all the benefit from a large number of cores. It depends on what operations you do a lot, as to how Photoshop would scale. When I was using Windows Movie Maker, only the final rendering uses multiple cores. The editing/interactive stage, seems to use one core. Is there a place for a 6 core processor ? At some point, this practice has got to have diminishing returns. You can run Cinebench on a fairly large group of cores (it is known as a perfect scaling benchmark). But once you've got past your first hour of running benchmarks, what real world thing really runs well on an infinitely large set of cores ? Is it worth spending more, for that opportunity, of running a couple of programs only, with more computing power ? If you do video editing all day, probably yes. If you want "future proofing" (on the chance some game will do a better job of thread balancing), a quad should be plenty. You can spend hours analyzing these things. For example, here, some games are GPU limited, and some other results just don't make a lot of sense (in terms of the benefits of overclocking). If you played one game a lot, and that game happened to be measured in this article, you might make your processor choice based on the results. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html My electricity rates will be going up here soon (to help pay for things like wind power and solar). And I'm pretty happy to be using a dual core, as a result. My current 65W dual core, uses 43W flat out, and 6W idle. If it was a quad, I'd likely see about 12W idle, which still isn't that bad. The rest of the computer wastes more power than that. You can see some video card power measurements here. One of the cards is only drawing 15.8 watts at idle, which is an improvement over previous generations. That allows you to build a gaming box, without feeling too guilty. In previous generations, a "fire breathing" video card, wasted lots of power all the time. http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/gigabyte-gf-gtx400/gtx400_power.png http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-gf-gtx400_6.html#sect0 Paul
From: John Doe on 19 May 2010 14:09
Paul <nospam needed.com> wrote: > For gaming, core loading tends to be asymmetric. Usually one > thread of execution is running one core at 100%, while > the other cores are loaded to 30%. You might see a 100-30-30-30 > loading pattern on a quad. So the quad doesn't run games > four times as fast. Balancing the threads of execution is > difficult. One possible problem with running a game that requires the 190% CPU power in your example is that one core might max out and the game might stutter. Does not matter whether that happens on a dual core or a quad core, but probably more likely on a dual core (without being as easy to correct). Being able to balance the load is useful and not all that difficult. I do a decent job of that manually here with a voice-activated script. It looks like this. "tasker": StartApp(r"C:\WINDOWS\system32\taskmgr.exe")+ WaitWindow(title="Windows Task Manager",timeout=4)+ Pause("40")+ Mouse("(222,102)/10,left/50")+#arrange by virtual memory size PlaySound(r"C:\Program Files\VoiceWorks\beep.wav")+ Pause("200")+ Mouse("right/100")+#right-click on process Key("a/100")+#affinity Key("space/10,down/5,space/10")+#toggle affinity Pause("100")+ Key("enter/10")+#exit dialog Key("escape/10")+#exit task manager PlaySound(r"C:\Program Files\VoiceWorks\boop.wav"), Some guy made a script for Forged Alliance that worked better than what I do for Supreme Commander 2. But either way, it can be done programmatically without much difficulty. Unfortunately, I do not know how to update the Core Optimizer for Forged Alliance. |