Tom's Hardware Revisits the Value of Multiple Cores

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cores-performance,2373.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...mance,2373.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"A few months ago, we looked into the effectiveness of using different numbers of CPU cores with various types of software. We received a lot of good feedback from that article, and there were some interesting suggestions from the community that we've taken to heart in this follow-up."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1249581497.usr20447.png" style="border: 0px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>A while back, Tom's Hardware did some tests to find out that most anyone stood to benefit from multi-core CPUs though those benefits diminished as the number of cores went past 3.&nbsp; In revisiting this issue, they've improved their testing methodology and found that not much has changed.&nbsp; The change from single to dual cores is quite dramatic and desirable, though for regular day to day use, triplets and more are not really that necessary.&nbsp; Of course, ethusiasts are we all are, it makes sense, but if you look at the netbook market, the majority of them are still single core workhorses, and many people are finding them adequate to the task.&nbsp; That realization has me believe that single core CPUs will still be around for quite some time to come, though they will be found with a lot of supplmentary horsepower to handle specialized tasks, like NVidia's ION, which handles video processing.&nbsp; I've only halfway migrated to multi-cores for all my home PCs and to be honest, I'm not seeing a huge benefit for my regular work.&nbsp; Anyone, who isn't doing video transcoding, gene manipulation or DDOSing Twitter, believe that multi-cores is absolutely necessary to daily computing?&nbsp; Why?</p>

[jeffd]

I pretty much come to the same conclusion. Dual core is a must for the normal user (although i've never seen anyone argue that single core cpu's were better. The whole point of dual core was because we can't go any higher on a single core), and power users could benefit from a quad, as more and more games are using them all and many good encoder application are using them fully. Dosn't look like they touched on >4 cores though, imo they are not real useful yet. Cores on quad core CPUs can still get much faster. Once they reach their limits, splitting them again will be more beneficial.

[Jason Dunn]

People ask this question on YouTube a fair bit, and I always say the same thing: unless you're using an application that you KNOW can scale to four or more CPUs, buy the fastest dual-core CPU you can afford and you'll get more benefit from that.

[Stinger]

In my daily life, I've only seen three tasks where multi-core CPUs make a big difference - video encoding, gaming and running virtual machines.

I do a lot of the first two so I went quad-core as soon as I could. I'm very happy with the results, especially in video encoding performance.

However, I'm sure the vast majority of won't benefit greatly from multi-core machines. PCs don't need a lot of CPU power to browse the web or write Word documents.

As an interesting aside, smartphones will be going multi-core in the next couple of years. Apparently there's major battery life benefits, so everyone should at least benefit in the mobile world.

[doogald]

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time reading through this, but how much of this is a measure of the Windows OS ability to schedule multiple cores vs. a true measure of the value of multiple cores in general? Would Unix, Linux, etc., OSes benefit more due to better scheduling algorithms, etc.?

I don't know, just commenting . . .

[jeffd]

stinger, I would think some good speed stepping would net any benefit that multi core could offer for battery operated devices. That said, dual core's in portable devices isn't new. creative Zens vision(:M) was pretty impressive for using a dual core cpu to brute force video decoding. One core was ARM9 based and the other side was RISC.

doogald, theres nothing on the OS side that linux does better, its pretty much in the hands of the program now. Now linux had multi core support much earlier so lot of applications today are written to use it. However most windows programs that people currently use now have been updated with multi core support as well, be it video editors, image editors, 3d renderers.