Benefits of more Thread?

[TheGRz]

Whats the benefit of more threads?

Ryzen 5 2200G has 4 cores and 8 threads. Ryzen 5 1600 has 4 cores and 12 threads. What is the advantage of 4 more threads?

 

[WildCard999]

2200G=4C/4T
2400G=4C/8T
1600=6C/12T

The benefit of having more cores/threads is for more multithreaded programs or games that are starting to use more then 4 cores such as newer Battlefield titles.

 

[Dugimodo]

The more things you leave running at once the more benefit you'll see. Also windows tends to have a lot of background tasks running so it can help spread those out a bit.

But the main thing is with the software you run, if it's written to take advantage of more threads it'll run better or faster.
For most home users 4 cores/4 threads is plenty (at least for now) and for general tasks you may not notice any difference from adding more.

For power users who run resource heavy tasks like maybe video editing or content creation more threads can really speed things up.
And gamers wanting to run all the latest games at very high settings and framerates also might want at least 6 cores these days, and if you want to stream at the same time or run something in the background even more so.

 

[canadianvice]

So, this varies by your intended use.

Every processor has a pipeline they execute the basic instructions on. Think of it sort of like a highway.

You have two rough solutions to maximize the number of cars getting through: you can increase the number of lanes (cores/threads) or you can increase the speed of the cars (clock speed).

An application has to be designed with this in mind though, as it's not automatic. Many newer games are starting to take advantage of multiple threads, but the killer app is typically compilation work (video editing, code, images, etc).

Getting a solid thread/core count is still almost always helpful though. Note, a core is worth a bit more than threads in this situation.

Threads are actually a count of simultaneous execution pipes that can run - you always get 1 per core.

Why you see more threads is a bit of a cheat, hence why pure cores are a bit better: threads in excess of the core count are not actually "real". basically those ones just trick the computer into passing more execution data into the processor, which allows the processor to optimize its execution flow better.

If you fully occupy the core with a task, the logical (fake) threads will not help you, as there's no room to optimize since the core is already chock full.


Tldr: more threads and cores is usually good, but software does have to be coded specifically to take good advantage of this. In a close comparison, take an additional core over more threads. Some threads (in excess of core count) aren't quite as useful as an extra core.

The reason these help you is because if you imagine the instructions your proc has to execute like cars, it's equivalent to adding more lanes to the highway.

 

[Obakasama]

As the explanations for threads suggests it requires the software to actually take advantage of it.

A practical example is the 3D software Blender. It can use those extra threads to render a scene faster than one with half the thread count. (I rely on CPU rendering because the graphics card doesn't hold up to scrutiny.)