How Many CPU Cores Do You Need?

[smithme08]

I happen to agree with apache_lives a bit. At the very least MOST of us have A/V doing live/real-time scanning of files we open/access. Many people run download tasks in the background (P2P or others such as the NUMEROUS auto-update tasks which seem to exist for every application I install any more), or play music while working, and other things like this.

I'm not exactly average, but I use 2 monitors and often throw up a video on the second one while working on the primary. But I also don't think most Tom's readers are "average" computer users either since they buy HP or Dell mostly on price without really even knowing what CPU they are getting....

It would be nice to see a set of tests reflecting this, such as doing an A/V scan while unzipping, or doing the Photoshop tasks. You get the idea

 

[zerapio]

@zingam, I totally agree with you. I normally have a ton of apps as part of my work environment: Visual Studio (2 instances), version control system, notepad (many instances), acrobat, command prompt, IM, calculator, Firefox (~40 tabs for different things). Of course in the background there's AV and other IT junk.

 

[Tindytim]

[citation][nom]zerapio[/nom]@zingam, I totally agree with you. I normally have a ton of apps as part of my work environment: Visual Studio (2 instances), version control system, notepad (many instances), acrobat, command prompt, IM, calculator, Firefox (~40 tabs for different things). Of course in the background there's AV and other IT junk.[/citation]
Okay, you're kidding.

I have a dual monitor setup myself, but I guess I'm one of the few people a bit more mindful of my app useage. Code::Blocks and Bluefish have tabs, so I don't need multiple instances open. I don't understand why you'd need notepad open in addition to an IDE. And what the hell do you need 40 Firefox tabs for? Along with Acrobat?

I read documentation while working all the time, but what sort of references do you need to make if you have 40 tabs and acrobat open?

Not to mention all of the apps you list take very little processing resources when using them (VB Studio only eats them up when compiling).

I'm not trying to make a case against more cores, I can use more cores. However, some of you seem to be spewing bull, and giving a bad name to multitasking.

 

[firewuff]

Only comment about being careful at use CS3 as a ref is CS4 is far better threadded and CS3 was a major code rebuild which suffered for this.

Video encoding is highly dependant on the codec optomisation, if FFMPEG was used you will find that the threading is low compared to the commercial codecs, hence little gain for more than 2 instances (although you can happily do mulitple encode tasks in parrallel).

One advantage of more cores is virtualisation, running multiple OS'es at the same time. This is somthing I do daily and with Windows 7's XP compatibility actually a VM there could be more reason to go Quad in the future.

More core is going to increase, given the 6 and 12 core plans from AMD and Intel well written software will be becomming increasingly important. Imagin a Dual socket machine with 2x12 cores.... does sound kind of sillly, but THE POWER THE POWER!

 

[8086]

FOR XP USERS You can also edit boot.ini to disable extra cores. This may be useful when you wish to save on power use or when you want to maximize the life of your laptop battery.

BOOT.INI SWITHCES:

/NUMPROC=
Specifies the number of CPUs that can be used on a multiprocessor system. Example: /NUMPROC=2 on a four-way system will prevent Windows from using two of the four processors.
/ONECPU
Causes Windows to use only one CPU on a multiprocessor system.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963892.aspx

 

[smithereen]

You should have used a monolithic quad-core like a Phenom II or Core i7. The reason the jump from dual- to triple-core was so small is because it had to start using the bus between the two dual-core dies, causing bottlenecking. This gives the Phenom II X3 even more unfair, bad publicity.

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]8086[/nom]FOR XP USERS You can also edit boot.ini to disable extra cores. This may be useful when you wish to save on power use or when you want to maximize the life of your laptop battery. BOOT.INI SWITHCES:/NUMPROC=Specifies the number of CPUs that can be used on a multiprocessor system. Example: /NUMPROC=2 on a four-way system will prevent Windows from using two of the four processors./ONECPUCauses Windows to use only one CPU on a multiprocessor system.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us [...] 63892.aspx[/citation]

it still is active in the background - a pointless tweak

two cores will process and complete most tasks faster aka heavier load for a SHORTER amount of time saving battery etc

[citation][nom]smithereen[/nom]You should have used a monolithic quad-core like a Phenom II or Core i7. The reason the jump from dual- to triple-core was so small is because it had to start using the bus between the two dual-core dies, causing bottlenecking. This gives the Phenom II X3 even more unfair, bad publicity.[/citation]

Disabling a core is just stupid anyhow, and if you had to, atleast use the AMD's because of the same architecture/cache etc between switching core count.

[citation][nom]zerapio[/nom]I remember way, WAY back when Intel introduced HT Toms HW ran tests to measure the benefit for users. The tests included running multiple apps at the same time and recording the time, framerate, etc. Why aren't these type of tests performed for this article? It seems that only multithreaded applications were considered and not concurrent applications on a mutithreaded OS. I'd like to see this in a follow-up article.[/citation]

Second that

[citation][nom]davidork_guest[/nom]I have a dual core, but think i'd be happier with a quad.a high clock dual is ok for games, but it seems a quad is a lot harder to bog down with multitasking.[/citation]

Alot harder - when you are doing multiple video conversions with older apps that dont do multithreading etc you can run a few copys and do 4+ at once, aswell as watch something, with your AV and surf the web - yes dual monitors are the best! and 8gb and RAID0 also help back me up.

 

[maigo]

one core per process, so win7 should be 60-80

 

[Guest]

The Photoshop filter is probably flat simply because the bandwidth needed for loading the data is more than the computation needed to filter it. Hence, all that adding more cores does is make them all hurry up and wait for the pixel data to trickle through the ram bus.

Also, a image filter is a worst case scenario for caching - the image is larger than the cache, and all of it must be processed.

In order to bring out a performance difference, the filter would need to be more expensive - larger radius (but not so large that the filter kernal itself overflows the cache), more complex filtering math, ect.

An interesting subnote is that the filter is an excellent benchmark for ram speed - it's a best case for data coalescing, since the data can easily be loaded in order, and the dataset is big enough that the cache becomes meaningless.

 

[Guest]

My word, whoever wrote this clearly hasn't thought it through.

You cant compare a 3 core Q6600 with a 4 Core Q6600, its retarded. The 3rd Core on the 3Core Q6600 now has double the cache available too it since the other core it shares the cache with is disabled. Thats why in 1 or 2 tests the 3 core beats the 4 core.

Its not like comparing the same CPU with different sized cores. And when testing two cores on the Q6600 2 core, did he use 0 and 1 which means less cache per core, or did he use 0 and 2, which means each core gets double the cache? That can skew the results tremendously.

 

[Guest]

It'll be interesting to see what impact Apple's snow leopard has on this....

 

[TxZx14_2006]

This is all pointless or worse yet obtuse. When enough multi-threaded applications appear to compare oranges to oranges then this will make sense.

 

[enterco]

[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]when you are doing multiple video conversions with older apps that dont do multithreading etc you can run a few copys and do 4+ at once, aswell as watch something, with your AV and surf the web - yes dual monitors are the best! and 8gb and RAID0 also help back me up.[/citation]
The number of users doing few copys and multiple video conversions is very small, probably below 0.01% of total PC users... Those who need to transcode so much amount of video are already using quad-core CPUs. Enjoy your new CPU, but consider that the rest of us (more than 80% of pc users) are using the PCs for less CPU intensive tasks and we do care about how much we spend on CPUs. We also do not have such a distributed attention, so we are unable to watch a movie and surf the web simultaneously. I personally press the 'pause' button when I surf, because I don't want to miss anything from the movie.

 

[Guest]

Hmm..probably because you have so much junk running in the background, legitimate overclockers and enthusiasts noticed you ignore the basic principles to tuning and performance tests:

Minimizing Programs running in the background that aren't needed. I can only imagine what your System Icon tray looks like.

But, thats why God invented Xbox.

 

[Tindytim]

[citation][nom]DrLambSteaks[/nom]But, thats why God invented Xbox.[/citation]
What sect of Gatesainity are you?

 

[masop]

Excessive cost? $200 for a mobo, $300 for a processor, and $100 for 6 gigs of RAM doesn't seem excessive to me considering the performance, versus the $200 for an AM3 mobo, $250 for the processor, and $75 for 4 gigs of RAM of a Phenom II.

The last time I priced out an I7 (few months ago), the cheapest processor (boxed, not oem) was between $500 - $750 and when adding in the mb and mem, it came to over 1 grand. That is why I said excessive. Obviously pricing has dropped alot since then.

-- MaSoP

 

[Tindytim]

The last time I priced out an I7 (few months ago), the cheapest processor (boxed, not oem) was between $500 - $750 and when adding in the mb and mem, it came to over 1 grand. That is why I said excessive. Obviously pricing has dropped alot since then.

No, you just have no idea what you're talking about.

Three Core i7 processors where released at launched, the 920, 940, and 965 "XE", The 920's launch price was $284. That price hasn't gone down.

 

[bgd73]

the real math, encoding, needs a single path. all other tests, like the past 5 hoaxed years, has been used with slithering slimy writers like sisoft and pcmark to use muulitple cores for fake answers with no questions...called hypothetical. Got a prescott? it could be the first in history to sell like a classic automobile...

 

[Guest]

"interesting is that the game only seems to take advantage of three CPU cores and that there is no performance benefit to using four cores"
that's because most optimised softwares and games are dual core optimised only, and the 3rd cpu might take some extra work from the "dual code", whiinteresting is that the game only seems to take advantage of three CPU cores and that there is no performance benefit to using four cores, but the 4th in no way can't make any more use of what 3rd cpu is not using at its full potential already

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]enterco[/nom]The number of users doing few copys and multiple video conversions is very small, probably below 0.01% of total PC users... Those who need to transcode so much amount of video are already using quad-core CPUs. Enjoy your new CPU, but consider that the rest of us (more than 80% of pc users) are using the PCs for less CPU intensive tasks and we do care about how much we spend on CPUs. We also do not have such a distributed attention, so we are unable to watch a movie and surf the web simultaneously. I personally press the 'pause' button when I surf, because I don't want to miss anything from the movie.[/citation]

Perhaps no one does it because they are stuck on crappy dual cores? and dont vote down on this post FUD croud cause your voting down on and against performance - we all want more performace, right?

 

[enterco]

[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]Perhaps no one does it because they are stuck on crappy dual cores? and dont vote down on this post FUD croud cause your voting down on and against performance - we all want more performace, right?[/citation]

Let's see how much does it matter 4 core vs 2 core:
1. Gaming Crysis benchmark : Core2 @ 3.33 GHz vs I7 @ 2.66 : 139.10 FPS vs 140.90 FPS = 0.01 FPS increase for 3.19 total frequency increase (6.66 GHz @ 2 cores vs 10.66 GHz)

2. Gaming, Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark : Core2 @3.33 GHz beats i7 920 @ 4x2.66 GHz AND Quad QX6800 @ 4x2.93 GHz

3. Productivity, Acrobat Professional: Core2 @ 3.33 GHz beats Q9650 and many others

I don't say that quad core cpus are useless, Im saying that 'average joe' won't need the power from 4 cores. Quads are the choice for workstations and servers. Average joe isn't encoding 4 movies at a time, while he's watching other thow movies on separate screens and doing few copys. But, if you're into graphics business, especially 3d content creation, then you need such a CPU, otherwise using such a CPU is just a waste of money. These days CPUs are by far best performers on a computer, the main slowdown factor are the mass storage devices, and for gamers, the graphics cards.

 

[Guest]

Why are you running a bunch of rarely used special effects filters in Photoshop?
Why aren't you trying functions that people actually use daily?

It's like you tested the time to open the moonroof in order to judge the speed of a Ferrari.

 

[Guest]

I think it is valid to want to see how typical running program combinations would affect overall performance.
For gamers (like me anyway) I'd want to see how the following combo would affect performance:
Antivirus, a program like Teamspeak, and a game in play
Thats all I'd be willing to have running.
Not everyone has the need or want to run several things at a time.

Perhaps there should be a few categories of tests:
Like a 3 app scenario, 5 app scenario, 7 app scenario etc...
Keep constants like antivirus or firewall(Gods forbid!) and vary the rest with web browsers, downloading files, IM clients, gaming and non gaming apps etc.. typically used in single app benchmarks.

I realize this makes testing difficult, but then the real world isn't as easy as one thing happening at a time.

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

I seem to allow myself to be easily influenced by the hype surrounding new software and hardware. It's funny when these FPS benchmarks go into triple digits (meaningless) or into decimal places. Hype is what sold Windows ME, GeForce 3s, etc. Example: Back in the day, I bought a GeForce 3 to be prepared for the release of Half Life 2. By the time it came out GF3 was obsolete and not talked about anymore, and while I owned it, no real world (noticeable) improvement on the software that I was running my GF2 on previously. Same goes with my recent Quad Core Q6600 upgrade. Did very little in terms of noticeable performance gain. Come to think of it, same for Windows Vista. I like it but it doesn't do anything that windows XP did for me. Granted, it would have given me nothing new to tinker with, but I could have bought every game my heart desired with the money I could have saved running my old system from 2 years ago.

 

[yonef]

I'm willing to know, how does multi-threading scales up when using Windows 7?? I'm on RC (7100) now and I saw a lot of improvement over the 7000 version on my HP TX1000 and on my Core2Duo desktop (both x64).

Multi-threading is nothing to do with windows itself, it depends on the particular application. Different windows has pretty much the same scaling for the particular app.