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So how many cores are enough these days?
- Thread starter Unknown_K
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My first dual processor system was back in 2000 (Dual PPro setup I still own) which along with Win2k (beta and finally the finished product) showed me how responsive having more then one CPU could be. In a perfect world we would only need 1 processor that was fast enough to complete all tasks at the same time and still be idle half the time waiting for our commands. Since we don't have anything that fast we have to make do with more slower processors and figure out how to divide the work. At first you just stuck an app to a different processor but programming tasks into small parallel parts works out better if possible. There come a point where the programming just doesn't have enough parallel tasks to give to all the processors and they will just idle doing nothing. Dual cores makes browsing the net much better (thanks to all the snooping going on you actually need horsepower to dump pictures to your screen these days). I notice my quad core under Win7 has all 4 cores going when doing daily tasks. None of the older games I play seem to do much with more then 2 cores. I suppose if I did more virtualization (my server is XP with a win2k VM for mac localtalk file sharing) then 8 cores would be good to have. It does seem like computers like dumping more and more functions the CPU used to have to handle to the GPU these days.
deathshadow
Veteran Member
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- Jan 4, 2011
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Definitely sounds like scripttardery in action, and it being on Google sites is just confirmation of how Google has been wetting their own bed by doing all the things that originally killed off their competition. It's almost like they WANT to be the new "ask jeeves" at the WORST of the code bloat slow loading headache.
Certain scripting heavy sites, PARTICULARLY if you open multiple tabs can cause massive spikes -- MOST of them being social media. Google+, FaceBook, twitter and their kine are so massively and ridiculously scripting bound that REAL Opera (12, as opposed to the ridiculously dumbed down and useless ChrOpera), Firefox, and legacy versions of IE can end up so pathetically slow even on multicore the browser will flip in and out of "not responding" nonstop.
It's not as bad in Chrome and ChrOpera because every tab gets it's own process and thread and the V8 engine runs each sites scripting in another thread... and now has a JIT compiler in the mix. (which is why node-webkit is ALMOST viable for native app development) You may want to give chrome a try for sites having such issues, even if the user interface is dumbed down to the worst of IE 3 Quackintosh circa 1996. (You'd almost think they were using console game design thinking).
Websites universally are pulling these dumbass scripttard stunts due to mouth breathing idiotic "framework" bull like jQuery, bloated "I can haz intarnets" markup, and other bits of idiocy that piss all over sites usability and functionality -- just so they can have "gee ain't it neat" animooted BS and resulting in mind-numbingly dumbass things like using hundreds of K of markup and a megabyte or more scripting to deliver single k totals of plaintext.
It's some real freaking herpaderp right now when it comes to website code -- and moronic simpleton bull like jQuery, turdpress, bootcrap, blueprint, LESS, SASS, OOCSS, even HTML 5 are what's really at fault alongside people sleazing together websites with such tools who to be frank have no business making websites in the first damned place.
... which is why you typically need a multi-ghz multi-core processor with broadband to do move the same amount of CONTENT we were 20 years ago with 486's over Dialup... and why so many websites are less useful now than they were just a decade ago.
Just look at these forums -- where vBull is pissing out 320k+ of scripttardery, 100k of CSS in three separate files, and a batshit insane 182k of markup for the main forum index which barely has 18k of plaintext on it -- anywhere from five to eight times as much markup should have been used, ten times the scripting needed for what's being done, and two and a half times more CSS than ANY website actually needs.
Makes me want to dump most of todays ignorant fools with the giant monkey brass to call themselves "designers" in a shark tank. <drEvil>and yes, I made air quotes with my fingers... "lasers" -- on the sharks freaking heads. </drEvil>.
I'm not rocking 25mbps down and a mutl-ghz quad core for the performance of a P150 shotgunning 112k when all I want to do is read and post on forums or Joe forbid read an e-mail. THANKS SCRIPTTARDS! Basically, my disgust for the state of web development has blossomed from "Disgust to the point of nausea" into full blown projectile vomiting, as MOST of the sleazeball asshats making the software being deployed have no business writing software for anyone! From the dipshits who make WYSIWYGS, to the halfwits behind CMS systems like turdpress, to the scam artist book writers encouraging people to use fat bloated junk like jquery and bootcrap -- time to line the lot of them up in the chute and put them down with 8 gauge solids to the head like they all had hoof and mouth.
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Scali
Veteran Member
Well actually... I am a tad curious about this.
I have been an amateur musician for decades, and have been using Cubase on Windows+ASIO for many years (started out with an Atari ST of course).
I've used various semi-professional hardware over the years, and ASIO never failed me really.
In fact, I've even done some ASIO driver development myself.
Tor
Veteran Member
Well, I mentioned Google sites already, but it's a bit hard to pin down. I normally have a large number of tabs open. But one that seems to be the cause of the problem more than the rest (or at least occasionally quitting the tab has silenced Firefox) is ebay. I sometimes have a couple of ebay tabs open, just to keep tab of some items I may want to look more at. And sometimes killing those tabs stops the CPU problem.
But there are other times where I just can't figure out what causes it, and that's when I stop Firefox. A restart brings up the same tabs, but now Firefox doesn't use abnormal amounts of CPU. Of course it also doesn't really reaload the sites until I refresh the tabs.
-Tor
I find four good cores (e.g. i5-3570) to be good for a Linux or FreeBSD development box. A lot of the systems I have deployed in the last few years run OK on 1 core, but work better on two or more (e.g. generating graphs with GNUPLOT running through a pipe from a CGI program under Apache web server really wants CPU in two threads at once). I haven't really tried the later AMD 8-core boxes (FX83x0), but the FX81x0 units weren't very effective for my needs due to the slow processing of individual cores.
I have a Linux box running Zoneminder that handles video surveillance for a half dozen or so cameras that runs well on a 6-core AMD CPU.
I don't use it much, but my coworker who handles lots of photos says GIMP takes good advantage of 4 cores (maybe more).
I have a Linux box running Zoneminder that handles video surveillance for a half dozen or so cameras that runs well on a 6-core AMD CPU.
I don't use it much, but my coworker who handles lots of photos says GIMP takes good advantage of 4 cores (maybe more).
Tor
Veteran Member
But sometimes one fast core is better than a hundred slower ones. Last year I worked on a system where an algorithm couldn't be multithreaded (feedbacks in the algorithm), and there were time constraints for when it had to be completed (before starting on the next data set). The only way to achieve that (in addition to use all the old tricks of speeding things up by a millesecond here and another there) was to tell the project manager to not bother with all those cores, just get the fastest clocked system instead.
Caluser2000
Banned
Just loaded this box up with a number of google and ebay tabs using the latest firefox and cpu usage didn't hit more than 5%. I must be doing something wrong.
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Agent Orange
Veteran Member
"How many cores are enough these days?" Well, my gamer has a FX-8350 with 8 cores and that seems to plenty. No real way for me to tell what's really happening in that box. I do know this: Along with a couple of pretty good video cards, I can run 3 or 4 things at the same time and nothing seems to take a hit performance-wise . So, bring on those cores.
Scali
Veteran Member
Depends on the game, graphics card and settings used.
Graphics drivers are single-threaded at least at some point in the pipeline, for the simple reason that there is only one GPU, and most commands need to be executed in a strict order to generate valid results.
Some games are quite 'command-heavy' and will bottleneck on AMD systems because the single-core performance simply isn't good enough to keep the GPU busy.
Console developers have also complained about this problem with the APU in the XB1 and PS4, which is even slower than the FX-series.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
That's a fair observation. But, if your frame rates are good and you can play without skips, hitches, and freeze frames, then what else do you need? You don't want to run that game so fast that it looks like a 1927 Charlie Chaplin movie. I think the ball is in the programmer's court. They need to take advantage of the present day technology.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Shades of P4 Hyperthreading--I wound up turning that off, as it didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference in getting things to work.
You're still fighting memory latency no matter what.
Scali
Veteran Member
With consoles that's a given, since all consoles of a given type are the exact same speed, so games are tuned to run at good framerates for that hardware.
Well, as I say... a fast GPU is so fast that you need a very fast CPU to feed it with commands quickly enough. AMD's CPUs simply aren't fast enough to take advantage of present day technology in GPUs. Note also how AMD's latest GPUs are never reviewed with AMD CPUs for that very reason.
Scali
Veteran Member
Depends. I've had good experiences with multithreaded optimizations on P4HT.
I did a multithreaded optimization for my Marching Cubes algorithm on Core2Duo back in the day: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59292
I could get about 30% more performance on a P4HT 3 GHz with HT enabled and running 2 threads.
SpidersWeb
Veteran Member
I disabled the HT on my i7 - doing so let the processor run cooler and more stable - letting me nab a further 10% increase in clock speed which benefits all tasks.
For the same reasoning I'm a fan of solid single threaded performance too for general desktop use - get everything done as fast as possible no matter what it is.
I'm not sure what the deal is with RAM speed - doesn't seem to matter what I target - low latency matched speed vs low latency higher speed vs increase latency at even higher speeds, dual channel vs triple channel, other than benchmarks - I never notice any difference at all :/
For the same reasoning I'm a fan of solid single threaded performance too for general desktop use - get everything done as fast as possible no matter what it is.
I'm not sure what the deal is with RAM speed - doesn't seem to matter what I target - low latency matched speed vs low latency higher speed vs increase latency at even higher speeds, dual channel vs triple channel, other than benchmarks - I never notice any difference at all :/
Chuck(G)
25k Member
I've still got a P4HT 3GHz box here, so I'll have to re-enable HT and run some of my heavy workload on it. I can't say that I've ever noticed much improvement subjectively. Perhaps the improvement is realized only with specific applications, although I would have thought that CAD would be a natural.
krebizfan
Veteran Member
RAM speed matters more for integrated graphics and the low end cache limited CPUs. AMD APUs need the fastest RAM available. Intel's i5 and i7 have enough cache to minimize the effects of choosing slightly slower RAM. Multichannel RAM makes a difference with database servers but more memory is even better; fill all the slots with the highest capacity sticks available.
Scali
Veteran Member
Yup, it's basically another level of cache.
More ram means the chances of data being in memory is larger, so you don't have to move to the much slower disk storage.
Then again, it depends on how large your database is. At some point, enough is enough. If the whole database fits in memory anyway (or at least you get memory hits ~90% of the time), then adding memory will not impact performance anymore, but having enough memory, but faster, will.
deathshadow
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99%+ of PC sound hardware in circulation has NO ASIO support under Linsux or Winblows. That's why software like ASIO4ALL exists. Have a laptop? FORGET IT, never happen... and dragging around a desktop to a live performance just so you can have a very expensive internal sound card? (since USB the latency is too high for real-time use?)
Even supposedly supported cards like the various Creative offerings are a driver train wreck of piss poor latency and some sort of strange "startup time" that takes up to half a minute of "not responding" before the program you are trying to use will even START on Winblows.
... and of course there's the worst part about having to resort to ASIO4ALL -- it might get you ASIO for ONE application, but kiss off running anything else that uses the sound card at the same time -- and SOMETIMES on some configurations you actually have to disable the sound card's OS driver just to get ASIO4ALL to let you use the card... or M$ GS wavetable built into windows decides to hog the card so ASIO4ALL won't even start.
It's part of why the EWI USB is a total ripoff for many PC users as you MUST have working ASIO and for most Windows machines there is no such thing! You don't make a $300 amateur level wind controller and then tell users they need a desktop PC so they can plug in EMU brand devices that nobody actually sells anymore.
Or that even many devices that claim to provide ASIO don't in anything Vista/newer... Admittedly, ALL audio drivers for Vista/Newer are utter and complete rubbish! See the giant middle finger they gave people who use MIDI professionally!
k2x4b524[
Veteran Member
So was 640kb..