Nvidia Says More CPU Cores are Better (and Why)

[Marcus Yam]

The more cores the merrier rule also applies to smartphones and other mobile devices.

Nvidia Says More CPU Cores are Better (and Why) : Read more

 

[theholylancer]

sooooo they are saying AMD > intel given that they offers more cores at the price point?

IE for the price of i5, you can get a Ph II X6?

or more just mobile (and our stuff only) and marketing had gotten a brain fart?

 

[mrface]

Load balancing has been around for awhile....

 

[eklipz330]

OMG WHAT?

STOP THE PRESSES!! SINGLE CORES ARE NOT FASTER THAN DUAL CORES!!!!!

-_-

 

[thearm]

[citation][nom]theholylancer[/nom]sooooo they are saying AMD > intel given that they offers more cores at the price point?IE for the price of i5, you can get a Ph II X6?or more just mobile (and our stuff only) and marketing had gotten a brain fart?[/citation]

I had to read your post three times to under what you where trying to say. Got it now! I'll still take Intel and Nvidia over AMD any day. I think they simply make better products. I used both at the beginning of my tech career now I only user Intel and Nvidia. I'm not opposed to an ATI video card though but I've had good luck with Nvidia so I'm sticking w/ them. I'm brand loyal until I have a good reason to not be.

 

[JerseyFirefighter]

[citation][nom]theholylancer[/nom]sooooo they are saying AMD > intel given that they offers more cores at the price point?IE for the price of i5, you can get a Ph II X6?or more just mobile (and our stuff only) and marketing had gotten a brain fart?[/citation]


AMD's benchmarks fall short overall vs it's same priced intel... i.e. the AMD x6 1090T vs the core i7 950. You can find the two for relatively the same price and cpu benchmarks put the intel over the AMD. Not to say that AMD still has the best bang for the buck on most of their products, but for AMD's top of the line hexacore, you'd expect it to beat our it's competitors quad cores. (there are also a number of quads above the 950 as im sure you know)

 

[JerseyFirefighter]

On a side note, at least my smartphone will be able to play crysis in the near future.

 

[Guest]

This is nothing new- been taught in every basic computer architecture class since the dual cores came out

 

[alyoshka]

So Nvidia finally see's light????
If that's the case they really need to beat the world fastest dual processor card by making a sing dual core GPU.......

 

[usfs]

DON'T WORRY CITIZENS CAPTAIN OBVIOUS IS HERE!

 

[leo2kp]

Hey I thought just a year ago they were saying CPUs were going out of style. Now they want MORE of 'em. Well, good, 'cause so do I.

 

[Horhe]

[citation][nom]thearm[/nom]I'll still take Intel and Nvidia over AMD any day. I think they simply make better products. I used both at the beginning of my tech career now I only user Intel and Nvidia. I'm not opposed to an ATI video card though but I've had good luck with Nvidia so I'm sticking w/ them. I'm brand loyal until I have a good reason to not be.[/citation]
I'm loyal to price/performance ratio, but biased towards Nvidia when it comes to video cards, because I like Nvidia CPL more than ATI CCC (which lacks scaling with fixed aspect ratio).

So, seeing as the performance of the smartphones' CPU rose dramatically in the past years, and the performance of the desktop CPU rose only a little, does this mean that in a few years phones will be as powerful as desktop PCs? We need faster desktop CPUs, not a CPU with 2^n (n>=4) cores. What am I going to do with so many idle cores?

 

[daship]

This is from the same idiots that said the GPU was going to take over the CPU.

 

[burnley14]

Unrelated to this article, but has the ability to give thumbs up/down been removed? I've found that every time I do it I come back and my promotions/demotions of comments have been neutralized. If so, I'm not happy about that change.

 

[konjiki7]

[citation][nom]JerseyFirefighter[/nom]AMD's benchmarks fall short overall vs it's same priced intel... i.e. the AMD x6 1090T vs the core i7 950. You can find the two for relatively the same price and cpu benchmarks put the intel over the AMD. Not to say that AMD still has the best bang for the buck on most of their products, but for AMD's top of the line hexacore, you'd expect it to beat our it's competitors quad cores. (there are also a number of quads above the 950 as im sure you know)[/citation]

AMD platform provides better throughput at high resolution 1600 or higher in terms of gaming it depends if the game is going to take advantage of that.

As you see below 1090T x6($199) in worst cases scenario performs the same as i950($290)at best its fast as or faster then i7 970($859).(Without overclocking.) The fun begins when its overclocked.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/100?vs=146

 

[e1m0]

I remember Intel saying something about once you reach a point, adding more cores becomes impractical.

 

[techguy911]

Its all based on software if software or os does not use extra cores having more cores does not help, some games still only use 1 core even windows 7 uses 2 cores any more don't help.
Having more than 1 core in xp does not help as it was not designed to do so windows 8 will make more use of more cores but most game developers still are behind on making multi-threaded games work well with 3 or more cores.
The problem lies with hardware if hardware could do the multi-threading on its own instead of relying on coding it for muli-thread use it would make it much easier to create software that could utilize more cores.

 

[spectrewind]

In the multi-core vs. multi-thread comparison, this makes sense. The graphic above assumes a perfection in processor selection affinity. No OS Windows OS does this (yet)...

Does DirectX (any version) support more than two cores (two simultaneous threads) yet?

Anyone still gaming on WinXP is locked at two cores at the OS kernel level.

 

[r3t4rd]

Anyone notice in the top chart, you have "F" for flash contents? I suppose NVIDIA is trying to say or it means all Apple iOS products are negated from having dual cores? That would only make sense and be funny.

 

[allenpan]

i dont think the "power" cumsumption umber is wrong, assuming Power = Voltage * Current (P=VI or P=VIcos@) or Voltage ^2 * Resistance (P=V^2R) or Power = Current ^2 / Resistance (P=I^2/R)

so now we have single core
V=1.1
P=p
I=p/1.1

assuming dual voltage are in cascade/series
V = 0.8*2
I=p/1.1
P = 1.6*(p/1.1) = 1.45p

if is in parallel
V = 0.8
I = p/1.1
P= 0.72p, however is in parallel = 1.45p
NV has strange math

 

[ahnilated]

There is a problem with loss across the cpu's. With each CPU not being 100% as efficient as the other with code interacting you get loss. It may only be 10-20% but it doesn't take long to have a total loss of a CPU. This was talked about a while ago with the fact that parallel processing programming in both the core and OS is not 100% efficient. In a 100 core system you could have 10-20 processors just wasting heat/electricity and doing nothing to help.

 

[ikefu]

If you consider that a device like a smart phone often has multiple apps always running (the call program, the e-mail scanner, etc.) and you can leave them as single threaded but spread them out then you can still keep near 100% efficiency. Of course games that need every once of processor available are another story.

 

[officeguy]

Essentially, having two cores splitting the work puts less strain on each individual core as compared to having a single core shoulder the entire load.

What does that mean? Will the single core wear out before the duel core. If both max out at 100% wouldn't it consume twice as much power. I am so core illiterate

 

[pocketdrummer]

It depends on the software. Some things can benefit from multi-threaded code, other things will still take forever even on a hexa-core. Not to mention, even programs that benefit don't have the proper coding to take advantage of anything past 4-cores (sometimes even two or three maxes it out).

 

[radiumburn]

most games only take advantage of 3 cores and the rest sit pretty idle.. now cpu intensive games like gta4 seem to benefit from more then 4 but even then the return is nothing like the jump from 1 to 2 cores..

Its definitely the software that's crippling most multi-core systems right now. I having a better system of assigning the work to individual cores would fix alot of issues with this but I don't see that in the near future. Now if you have a piece of software specifically written for a system then you can tweak it to run like a cheetah but with so many different configs out right now I see an issue writing the software to be versatile enough to make use of all the different configurations..

Makes me think of WOW where the sys requirements for each expansion was upped a bit. Slowly phasing out the older systems. I think there needs to be less backwards compatibility on the next windows OS (even though I use linux) so more people are forced to toss their old 2001 dell/gateway with a 700mhz cpu...