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How many cores?



 
 
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  #1  
Old May 19th 10, 01:02 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
LSMFT
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Posts: 30
Default How many cores?

If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores
are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3,
4, 7 or what?



--
LSMFT

I haven't spoken to my wife in 18 months.
I don't like to interrupt her.
  #2  
Old May 19th 10, 01:39 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
TVeblen
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Posts: 502
Default How many cores?

On 5/19/2010 8:02 AM, LSMFT wrote:
If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores
are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3,
4, 7 or what?



This is like me asking: "I'm buying a new car. How many horsepower do I
need?"
(Answer: As many as freakin possible!! ;-)

In the future, most programs will be written that take advantage of
multiple processors and they will run better and faster. If you have
some of these programs now you will benefit from a multi-core processor
system. Windows 7 uses multiple processors. Many of the newer games can
use them.

But many of the programs available today do not take advantage of
multiple processors and you will see no improvement in performance. You
would get more bang for the buck from faster HDDs, more and better
memory, or better graphics card.

But if you, like me, believe in "future proofing" your builds, then a
multi-core processor system will be functionally viable further into the
future than older technology and you will not need to replace the system
as soon due to obsolescence.

If you replace your system every few years anyway, there would be far
less need to "future-proof" and you could save money by using "current
standard" parts.


  #3  
Old May 19th 10, 02:29 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
John Doe
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Posts: 4,274
Default How many cores?

TVeblen Killtherobots hal.net wrote:

LSMFT wrote:


If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how
many cores are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or
should I go for 3, 4, 7 or what?



This is like me asking: "I'm buying a new car. How many
horsepower do I need?" (Answer: As many as freakin possible!!
;-)


The real answer is a question "What do you need the car for?"

Nobody can tell you what is adequate without knowing your applications.
And IMO the best place to find out how much power you need is in the
groups that run the applications you plan to run.
  #4  
Old May 19th 10, 02:36 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Animenia[_30_]
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Posts: 1
Default How many cores?


It all comes down to what the system is going to be used for and how
long you see yourself use this particular system.
At the current rate of hardware being processed and software being
written I'd say in about 2 years the current top-of-the-line dual core
systems will be viewed as the "home desktop for simple surfing, paying
bills" etc etc.

If you are planning on playing with this new system, edit videos and
other processes that require better and better hardware I would go
straight for a Quad core system if not better... Of course it depends on
your budget as well.

/ Ani


  #5  
Old May 19th 10, 05:01 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default How many cores?

LSMFT wrote:
If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores
are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3,
4, 7 or what?


If you grossly mismatch the processor to the set of tasks, what
you're doing is wasting electricity on the cores that aren't
being used.

If the machine was for email, Microsoft Office, web surfing,
you could easily get away with a high clock rate dual core.

If you always have a DVD Shrink running in the background,
do video editing, process large Photoshop posters, perhaps
a quad would make more sense.

For gaming, core loading tends to be asymmetric. Usually one
thread of execution is running one core at 100%, while
the other cores are loaded to 30%. You might see a 100-30-30-30
loading pattern on a quad. So the quad doesn't run games
four times as fast. Balancing the threads of execution is
difficult.

Changing a program from a single thread of execution, to
multiple threads, is difficult enough. Changing it to run
on an arbitrary number of cores, efficiently, is even more
difficult.

To give an example, Excel has added to it, the ability to
compute on more than one core. But the list of exception
cases, things that can't be run in parallel, is as long as
your arm.

Photoshop filters are divided into two sets. One set runs
on a single core. The other set runs on multiple cores.
It is unclear what the upper limit on cores is. Not all
Photoshop operations, as a result, get all the benefit
from a large number of cores. It depends on what operations
you do a lot, as to how Photoshop would scale.

When I was using Windows Movie Maker, only the final rendering
uses multiple cores. The editing/interactive stage, seems
to use one core.

Is there a place for a 6 core processor ? At some point,
this practice has got to have diminishing returns. You can
run Cinebench on a fairly large group of cores (it is known
as a perfect scaling benchmark). But once you've got past
your first hour of running benchmarks, what real world thing
really runs well on an infinitely large set of cores ? Is it
worth spending more, for that opportunity, of running a couple
of programs only, with more computing power ? If you
do video editing all day, probably yes. If you want
"future proofing" (on the chance some game will do a better
job of thread balancing), a quad should be plenty.

You can spend hours analyzing these things. For example, here,
some games are GPU limited, and some other results just don't make a
lot of sense (in terms of the benefits of overclocking). If you played
one game a lot, and that game happened to be measured in this article,
you might make your processor choice based on the results.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...u-scaling.html

My electricity rates will be going up here soon (to help pay
for things like wind power and solar). And I'm pretty happy
to be using a dual core, as a result. My current 65W dual
core, uses 43W flat out, and 6W idle. If it was a quad,
I'd likely see about 12W idle, which still isn't that bad.
The rest of the computer wastes more power than that.

You can see some video card power measurements here. One of the cards
is only drawing 15.8 watts at idle, which is an improvement over
previous generations. That allows you to build a gaming box, without
feeling too guilty. In previous generations, a "fire breathing"
video card, wasted lots of power all the time.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video...x400_power.png

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...0_6.html#sect0

Paul
  #6  
Old May 19th 10, 07:09 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
John Doe
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Posts: 4,274
Default How many cores?

Paul nospam needed.com wrote:

For gaming, core loading tends to be asymmetric. Usually one
thread of execution is running one core at 100%, while
the other cores are loaded to 30%. You might see a 100-30-30-30
loading pattern on a quad. So the quad doesn't run games
four times as fast. Balancing the threads of execution is
difficult.


One possible problem with running a game that requires the 190% CPU
power in your example is that one core might max out and the game
might stutter. Does not matter whether that happens on a dual core or
a quad core, but probably more likely on a dual core (without being
as easy to correct). Being able to balance the load is useful and not
all that difficult. I do a decent job of that manually here with a
voice-activated script. It looks like this.

"tasker":
StartApp(r"C:\WINDOWS\system32\taskmgr.exe")+
WaitWindow(title="Windows Task Manager",timeout=4)+
Pause("40")+
Mouse("(222,102)/10,left/50")+#arrange by virtual memory size
PlaySound(r"C:\Program Files\VoiceWorks\beep.wav")+
Pause("200")+
Mouse("right/100")+#right-click on process
Key("a/100")+#affinity
Key("space/10,down/5,space/10")+#toggle affinity
Pause("100")+
Key("enter/10")+#exit dialog
Key("escape/10")+#exit task manager
PlaySound(r"C:\Program Files\VoiceWorks\boop.wav"),

Some guy made a script for Forged Alliance that worked better than
what I do for Supreme Commander 2. But either way, it can be done
programmatically without much difficulty. Unfortunately, I do not
know how to update the Core Optimizer for Forged Alliance.
  #7  
Old May 20th 10, 04:47 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 1,453
Default How many cores?

LSMFT wrote:

If I build a new pc with a new motherboard and processor, how many cores
are necessary and or used. Is x2 still adequate? or should I go for 3,
4, 7 or what?


Since you never bothered to mention a cost restraint, get a processor
with as many cores (as your OS will support, something else you didn't
bother to mention). You never identified WHAT software you will be
running on your new build. Maybe you'll be running VMWare Server and
would like to have several virtual machines loaded and running at the
same time and would like to assign a core to each one.
 




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