Who benifits from an 8 core?

[ORION85]

As Ryzens new chips are out boasting their 8 cores i was wondering who would need so many cores, if they have hyper threading and what programmes and games benifit from them and how many cores they use in total at one time.

Orion

 

[USAFRet]

As Ryzens new chips are out boasting their 8 cores i was wondering who would need so many cores, if they have hyper threading and what programmes and games benifit from them and how many cores they use in total at one time.

Orion

The same type of people that benefited from a dual core when that was a brand new thing.
Or a 16 bit CPU instruction set, when 8 bit was the mainstream.
Or if you ever used the Turbo button on your IBM XT compatible.

Software will eventually catch up.

 

[geofelt]

Ryzen has 8 cores plus so they can dispatch 16 threads.
Most games today can effectively use only 2-3 threads. If you see activity on many threads, it is just windows spreading the activity of a few threads out over all available threads.
There are some batch applications that can use many threads. Ryzen is great if you have an app that can keep all 16 threads busy.

Multiplayer games with many participants are probably the only games that can use many threads.

 

[mamasan2000]

God benefits...
Everyone who has use of more than 4 cores benefit. If you play games that do that (Crysis, Far Cry, Assassins Creed etc) but especially stuff like rendering videos, encoding, productivity stuff.
Amount of cores used depends on application. Virtualdub has no problems using all my 16 cores. They are not pinned 100% but I haven't ever seen that anyway. Closer to 50-60% over 16 cores, 8 actual cores.

 

[SkyBill40]

Everything and everyone. Computing is marching forward with regularity and multi-core processing is where it's at. Yes, by and large gaming is still mostly a single threaded affair... but developers are releasing more games that utilize multiple cores every year. While said games may not yet be fully optimized to spread the load effectively or efficiently, they are improving and it does make a difference.

Multiple cores are almost a necessity if productivity is a consideration for your machine.

 

[thx1138v2]

It's not just gaming. Anyone who keeps many windows and applications running at the same time can also benefit.

 

[lightc]

At the moment, very few applications can actually effectively use 16 threads, also those which can are not doing it in all tasks. There are many articles around how Adobe software performs, for example, not all tasks benefits from more cores, some are still relying on actual core frequency. I'm heavy Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom user myself and from my experience, I saw almost no improvements from 4790K to 5930K and to 6900K (4, 6 and 8 core CPUs) in most of my workflow, there was very little gain in image exporting, but almost no improvements in other tasks. Same for gaming, in CPU heavy games like BF1 or WatchDogs 2, those Intel Extreme processors sits in 30-40% usage max, with Titan X Pascal graphics card, clearly not using their potential at all.
No doubt there are some tasks where 16 threads would be beneficial, but for average, or probably even demanding consumer, in most scenarios, 7700K will do just fine.

 

[ORION85]

Interesting USAFRet

 

[CountMike]

As Ryzens new chips are out boasting their 8 cores i was wondering who would need so many cores, if they have hyper threading and what programmes and games benifit from them and how many cores they use in total at one time.

Orion

The same type of people that benefited from a dual core when that was a brand new thing.
Or a 16 bit CPU instruction set, when 8 bit was the mainstream.
Or if you ever used the Turbo button on your IBM XT compatible.

Software will eventually catch up.

Exactly my sentiments even programs/games using lesser number of cores still do (albeit marginally) on more cores. After all there is also OS to consider and also other things that have to run in the background. If you look at per core usage you would see that at no time one or more cores stay at 0% usage. Modern OS like W10 take care that load is more or less evenly distributed.
Now, there may not be immediately financially feasible to jump from a 4 or 6 core processor to 8 cores just for few older games but situation is rapidly changing.

 

[ORION85]

Great answers guys thank you

 

[Isokolon]

The thing is, consumer grade 8c/16t CPUs didn't really exist. Apart from Intel's heavily priced X CPUs.

From what I hear video editing is cut in half with Ryzen.
Concerning other things, not too long ago a regular 4c8t i7 was considered overkill because...Who'd need so many threads. Now things are different and i have to disagree with geofelt - 2/3 threads aren't enough for gaming anymore with newer titles.
For example BF1 - my 6700k does pretty good. However it suffers slightly if I at the same time listen to music, am in teamspeak, have steam running in the background,... Not everyone be like me in that regard but it's a reality for many people. More cores and threads can help a lot there.
There are several games that scale well over 8 threads by now and if you got 8 physical cores behind those threads that has to be an advantage (of course it's a bit more complicated with IPC/clockspeeds/and so on)

But I think it's mostly: build it and they will come.
With those machines entering the market there will be programming and optimizing for these machines in no time.