mayankleoboy1 :
Most desktops are 99% idle 90% of the time. The normal overhead of running windows+other services is ususally 1% of total CPU power or less. And a antivirus scanner is normally smart enough to no start a scan during heavy CPU/GPU/disc load.
IOW, what background tasks take more than 2-3% CPU ?
Doing what you describe would definitely generate interesting numbers, but IMO they arent real-world.
*Cracks knuckles*
The "99% idle 90%" is a red hearing. It's idle because the user is not sitting in front of it and thus the system has nothing or little to do. A computer will not be playing a video game while the user is not present. The system could be rendered to 0% power and the user would not be effected. The system could be replaced by a lump of coal and the user would not be effected during those idle times, if anything the coal would be beneficial to the user as it doesn't consumer power and could be burned at a later date to generate electricity.
Now if we're talking about when a user is actually sitting there doing something, then that's another matter. Obviously the coal wouldn't do the job so we must move on to something more modern. Now for most non-gaming user activities a four core low power CPU is more then sufficient. I emphasize four cores because while a user won't be doing demanding activities they will be doing multiple activities and you want to ensure that no single application could consume all available processing resources. Things like web-browsing, listening to music, watch youtube videos, working with open office, digging through files and other common tasks. Now that we've determined a cheap phone CPU could do "most" user desktop work, lets focus on the situations were users need something "more".
Occasionally there will come a time when the user needs to do something a bit more then just browsing the web, watching cat videos and / and or doing open office work. Those tend to fall into two broad categories, gaming and multimedia. Multimedia is when the user is encoding / trans-coding material and is a very CPU intensive task. Gaming is when the user is playing something more demanding then flash and can be demanding or not depending on it's design. This is where we make our money and determine what CPU is right for which user. Based on cost vs performance required.
Now that we've laid that out, here is what I do when I'm not browsing websites or doing other common tasks. I play a multitude of video games, it helps me relieve stress from work. Now I tend to keep waterfox open in the background with 10~20 tabs with common sites already loaded and waiting for my reference. I know I'm not the only one who does this, so before we've loaded the game we have a need for some parallel processing. I also have Ventrilo (MMO fans know what this is) up and connected to my guilds vent server, often people will hop on and off and we can chat about various things. If the game I'm playing is the MMO with my guild then this because our primary communications method for command and control. During groups sometimes I'll load up third party mapping applications to assist with runs or do other tasks I need done, this is more processing power that is required. And often while doing all this I'm download a few videos / files or doing some other random work in the background.
Now all that "extra" isn't nearly as intensive as the game itself (most of the time) but it does add to the system workload. Most importantly it highlights that CPU's that "just barely" make it as "gaming", namely the i3's and low core count AMD's are actually insufficient for the task at hand. They play the single player timed loop demo like a champ, yet load up vent, waterfox and a few others and suddenly there is no longer enough CPU resources available and stuttering happens. Just stop and think, the i5 is literally 200% more powerful then the i3 yet the above demonstrates that not all of it's resources are being utilized yet we can see the i3 is being maxed out with just the game itself.
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