4 Cores? 6 Cores? Do You Care?

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has updated its processor price list earlier today. Common sense suggests that Intel may not care that much anymore whether its customers know what they are actually buying. One new six-core processor slides in between six-core and quad-core processors – and its sequence number offers no clues about cores, clock speed, and manufacturing process. If we remember the gigahertz race just a decade ago, it is truly stunning to see how the CPU landscape has changed. Today, processors carry sequence numbers that are largely meaningless."

Comments

More Cores, More Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want to have a 4 inch penis? Don't you think a healthy 6 or 8 inches might be better?

I have a quad core, which I'm confident will soon become the equivalent of a 4 inch penis. I'll have to upgrade my e-peen when it become affordable.

Seriously though, if you like to game on your computer there is no such thing as too much power.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[thomasinx]

Not necessarily. I could very easily envisage a 6 core system that plays games/handles most tasks worse than a quad core system (emphasis on most). More cores doesn't necessarily mean more power. There are many other statistics to take into account before a judgement can be made, especially when it comes to gaming. Your e-peen is safe for now. Put it to good use.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[kanto]

Pfft.. this reminds me a bit of the jump to DirectX 9 graphics cards; in general the old cards performed better in brute force triangles per second whereas the new ones would perform better at the more technically advanced stuff (read: the things you disable when you're serious about fps). How much use is it having 6 or 8 cores if the program being run only efficiently uses 2 or 4 of them most of the time? It's not like everything can just be multithreaded like that and even if it can, there's bound to be some overhead for doing it.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Locke2005]

You say that like you have some personal experience with women looking elsewhere...

Re:More Cores, More Power

[cynyr]

because some of us run more than one thing at a time....

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Locke2005]

My wife says it doesn't matter how many cores I have!

Of course, my wife also said she wanted 10 inches... I just told her, "Screw you! I am NOT having it shortened!"

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Grishnakh]

Maybe I'm missing something, but unless the 6-core system is clocked slower than the 4-core one, the 6-core system should outperform it easily in all tasks.

Where it becomes questionable is when you're comparing higher-clocked fewer-core systems to slower-clocked, greater-core systems, because then it comes down to the software you're running and how well it's architected for multiple processes and parallelization. Obviously, a single-threaded application will generally run better on the faster-clocked system, unless that system is being loaded down with a lot of other processes.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[ultranova]

How much use is it having 6 or 8 cores if the program being run only efficiently uses 2 or 4 of them most of the time?

The program? I dunno about you, but I run plenty of programs at once. And having 4 cores means that I have a few on standby whenever I feel like doing input, even when the machine is busy processing stuff.

The real issue I see is memory access. Even with a single core did we run into memory bandwidth/latency bottleneck; with 4-6 cores those are 4-6 times as much. In the long run we have to give up Neumann architechture; it simply can't scale to our needs. A NUMA might be an acceptable compromise, but in the long run we need to change to a dataflow architechture, and that also means a step beyond C/C++ and other Algol-descended languages which have dominated our thinking these past decides.

We need to switch to a system with lots of cores, all with their own local memory, and able to send each other messages. As an added bonus, such a system is also a natural fit for artificial intelligence.

It's not like everything can just be multithreaded like that and even if it can, there's bound to be some overhead for doing it.

True, but most hard problems can be redefined as search problems, and those can be efficiently multithreaded. Our current programming languages just make multithreading a pain, since you have to worry about everything manually.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Surt]

The 6 core system is slower in non-parallel tasks because the OS has per-core overhead. So all single-threaded tasks get slower as the number of cores rises.

Imagine a task running on an otherwise idle core. It is running as fast as possible, with only OS overhead getting in the way of using 100% of that cpu. Now add more OS overhead to that cpu for core management. There's also cpu (hardware)-level overhead to consider, and the possibility that caches aren't ramped to the same level, so now more cores may be sharing a same-sized cache ... etc.

Lots of reasons for the performance of a single core to drop as the number of cores goes up.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[flappinbooger]

Here's my take. Gaming is not the question here. Gaming is, has, and will be about clock speed and graphics card.

No computer should be built today with less than 2 cores, that much is a given. Anyone who is at all a "power user" should consider a 3 core. AMD's triple cores are really stinkin snappy. Quad core systems? Of course they will become the norm, after a while. Intel and AMD have basically said that since they can't go up in speed they're going to go sideways with cores.

As screens get bigger they will fill up with this feed, that feed, weather, streaming video, multiple website tabs, flash games, a few trojans, printer drivers, chat clients, etc. Lots and lots of things going on at the same time, more cores will make future computing a much more enjoyable experience.

Hey, Intel - shrink the atom core, clock it at 2.5 to 3 ghz, give us 50 atoms on one chip and save yourself some hassles with this iWhatever confusion. Make the model number the number of atom cores.

Regarding TFA? The marketing guy must have been laid off, this numbering system is stupid (intel and amd!). I3 = dual core, I5 is both 2core and 4core, I7 is 4 core, but is now 6 cores. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh huh.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Jeremy Erwin]

Two four inch penises might be interesting.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Anonymous Coward]

The flip side of that joke is: My wife said she wanted me to give her 12 inches and make it hurt, so I put it in 3 times and hit her with a hammer!

Re:More Cores, More Power

[Cylix]

Even dismissing core overhead and other details you did not mention there are still some wildly important facts to remember.

Only modern games have been designed to take advantage of multi-processor systems. There is also a scaling factor which needs to be considered on an engine by engine basis.

I believe valve only recently made updates to the hl2 engine which optimize for greater then four core systems. While you could vary well purchase a dual proc host and fit it with 4 or 6 core processors the engine may not be able to scale on greater then 2 to 4 threads.

At one point the multi-core support wasn't so hot and I had to disable it on my dual core system. Again, this is an application by application basis and not all experiences will be equal. Certainly, in the future we can assume most newer systems will utilize the hardware better, but it is no guarantee for today.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[SanityInAnarchy]

I would hope that the scheduling would get better, actually, but even if the engine is only optimized to take advantage of four cores, it would probably run better if it could actually have all four cores to itself, with the OS and everything else running on core five.

I suppose it depends how much overhead there is.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[internettoughguy]

Actually its: cmd /C start /affinity 1

Re:More Cores, More Power

[h4rr4r]

Please name one of these tasks, Pentium D is such a crap design I would love to know what it does do well.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[The Snowman]

The 6 core system is slower in non-parallel tasks because the OS has per-core overhead. So all single-threaded tasks get slower as the number of cores rises.

Imagine a task running on an otherwise idle core. It is running as fast as possible, with only OS overhead getting in the way of using 100% of that cpu. Now add more OS overhead to that cpu for core management. There's also cpu (hardware)-level overhead to consider, and the possibility that caches aren't ramped to the same level, so now more cores may be sharing a same-sized cache ... etc.

Imagine a single-threaded game with a high CPU demand that consumes all time on a single CPU, while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.

Yes, each core has overhead, but in general, more cores does increase the system's potential performance even if it maintains or decreases an application's performance.

Honestly, this is not always a big deal. I have a quad core, but often have to wait for the hard drive to do anything.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[AmigaHeretic]

I think you made the wrong analogy.

Do you want 1 big penis or 6 to 8 tiny ones?

Re:More Cores, More Power

[confused one]

lots of legacy VB code. Some jobs run as fast or faster on Pentium D compared to a Core 2. The code is single threaded and it does not take advantage of any of the CPU design improvements implemented since the Pentium II or the early Pentium III. Since the Pentium 4 and Pentium D ALU runs at 2x the processor core speed, for these tasks it does well.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[recoiledsnake]

Just add 4 more cores to handle the core overhead.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Jeremy Clarkson school of Computer Science.

POWERRRRRRRR!

Re:More Cores, More Power

[vlm]

while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.

More likely, given todays throw away mentality of, "if its infected, just throw it out and buy a new PC", using a 6-core processor means you get 5 "free" worm/virus infestations before you "have to" buy a new computer. Unless you run mac or linux of course.

Re:More Cores, More Power

[TheThiefMaster]

There are a couple of errors in what you've said:
1: The newer CPUs can switch between one fast core and multiple slower cores based on demand (they call it "turbo boost" / "turbo core"). This means that there isn't really any speed loss for a higher number of cores any more.
2: There would be no point in hyperthreading if it gave a guaranteed cut in performance like that. If only one of the two "virtual" (actually "hardware") threads is in use, the other one runs at full speed.

This adds up to meaning that there isn't normally a cut in single-thread performance for getting a cpu with more cores, unless you actually use them. And if you do load the other cores, the performance drop is much less than if you put that much load onto a single cpu core...

Re:More Cores, More Power

[flappinbooger]

yeah, but not everyone will go mobile and/or use something like the iPad. I just think some people don't "work that way."

Re:More Cores, More Power

[shadowfaxcrx]

Anyone with that attitude is almost guaranteed to not be running Linux.

And almost guaranteed To be running Mac.

At which point, you have however many cores Steve Jobs tells you to want.

It's in their best interests

[mikael_j]

The average consumer just thinks "bigger is better" and by creating a mess of hard to understand sequence numbers they can make it harder for the semi-knowledgable customer to pick the right CPU. The same can be seen with graphics cards and many other products (if there is some kind of system behind your sequence numbers you do have to remember to change the system every now and then to further confuse everyone).

Re:It's in their best interests

[pelrun]

Yep, much like the mobile phone industry - make the whole mess so utterly confusing that instead of picking an appropriate product that suits your budget, you're tricked into buying at an inflated price.

Re:It's in their best interests

[pclminion]

What benefit is there in confusing your customers as to which product they should purchase? When I, as a consumer, feel overwhelmed or confused about a product choice, I usually respond by simply purchasing nothing at all. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

Re:It's in their best interests

[mikael_j]

Because when the mythical "Joe Sixpack" walks into a store to buy a new computer so that his intartubes will go faster he'll either fall for the sales pitch of find the machine with the best "big number to price" ratio and if you can sell crap at inflated prices because it's got a big number that's easy money.

And then there's the "prosumer", the guy who actually knows a bit, he/she will hopefully be confused and not realize the difference in performance between the 3782GXT CPU and the 4790GXT CPU is actually that the 4790GXT is clocked 200 MHz faster which doesn't justify the $140 price difference.

As for the actually knowledgable customer, well he or she most likely has already decided that a new CPU/computer is a necessity and will force him-/herself through the process of figuring out how the sequence numbers are supposed to work, most of these sales won't be lost by annoying the customer and the few that are lost are most likely made up for by the previous categories of customers.

Re:It's in their best interests

[spazdor]

There are others, who respond to the same stress by spending indiscriminately. And their reaction might, on the economic whole, outweigh yours.

Re:It's in their best interests

[Wowsers]

Picking the right CPU is quite easy, it's the motherboard that's the problem, especially with the current fad of putting on the board as few PCI slots as possible. No wonder there's not the problem there once was with IRQ conflicts, because there's not enough slots to make conflicts!

Re:It's in their best interests

[Pharmboy]

The problem now is that you have to do a tremendous amount of research before you buy now. It used to be much simpler: Pentium 60, 66, 75 or 100, pick one. Later it was still simple with Celeron or P2/P3/P4, as you are picking bigger cache and faster bus speed. Now to get the highest return on partially defective silicon, they offer too many models, many that overlap each other, and can be very confusing, with some dual core models that outperform quad core, etc. A year ago I finally settled on a Q9550 but it took reading 50 articles to figure out that it was, at the time, the best bang for the upper middle buck. So yes, the average consumer will get boned.

Re:It's in their best interests

[ultranova]

Picking the right CPU is quite easy, it's the motherboard that's the problem, especially with the current fad of putting on the board as few PCI slots as possible.

To be fair, most boards nowadays have both networking and sound integrated, so it's not like the average consumer needs that many (or any, to put it bluntly) PCI slots. Add a graphic card, and that's it.

Re:It's in their best interests

[GreatBunzinni]

You may not be alone in that but you, along with those who think like you, certainly are not the majority. Joe Six-pack doesn't know the difference between a megahertz and a megabyte and he has much more important things to do than waste his time learning boring stuff such as the difference between SSD HDs and the traditional spinning disk HDs, let alone learn what a processor core is and what importance, if any, it has on his computing needs.

He just goes off to buy a computer and spends his money on what appears to be the best possible product he could purchase on his budget. He just chooses whatever product has the biggest e-penis he can afford. That means he chooses the one with more megahertz, the one with more HD memory, the one with more RAM, the one with more cores, the one with the bigger processor number... Heck, joe six-pack may even end up choosing a computer just because it comes with more RAM chips. "see? it has more rams, which is good."

The sad thing about it is that this behaviour is perfectly natural. When you decide to purchase something, you end up purchasing the best option according to the information that you were able to access and digest. Some of us may be better informed than others but we all do this. Some of us are better informed to the point of being able to see pass Intel's marketing bullshit but others aren't quite so fortunate. Nonetheless, the decision process is the same.

Re:It's in their best interests

[rm999]

Even very knowledgeable people have a hard time predicting how fast a CPU will be. CPUs no longer operate in a single dimension that can be quantified by a single number. You have the architecture, cache size, clock speed, number of cores, FSB, etc. A slower quad core CPU may be faster for me, whereas a faster-clocked dual core may be faster for a gamer. A cheap atom chip may be better for my poor cousin who just surfs the web.

My point is customers should not be using the name of a CPU to decide what to buy. The best thing to do is to find benchmarks that reflect what you want to do and divide by price. The second best thing, great for the typical person, is to find a trustworthy computer builder/seller and let them decide what you need (e.g. buy a "gaming" computer). They can properly market the right CPU to the right person in the "right" price range.

Re:It's in their best interests

[izomiac]

Now this is something I've not been able to find an answer for. Do sound cards actually matter with modern hardware? Mostly I've just seen a difference in the number of channels they handle, and the post processing the driver does.

If that's all, one can just use a USB sound card with an appropriate number of channels, and use FFDShow to distort the audio however you wish. Does the more expensive hardware more faithfully reproduce the audio (higher SNR)? I know cheap portable devices (and Intel HD Audio) have excellent audio output, over 100 dB in SNR, so surely there are diminishing returns... Or does it merely save the negligible CPU usage, much like offloading network IO?

Either way, even the cheapest integrated sound card is much higher quality than most speakers and headphones, so you'd see a far greater gain in audio quality with $200 headphones plugged into a $5 integrated sound card than vice versa. You have to know what's bottlenecking your performance if you hope to improve it.

Re:It's in their best interests

[electrosoccertux]

This is actually what a lot of America is founded on-- think about it, in an ideal world a company would have a need, and they would go find the company that provides the solution.
We do the opposite, we employ tons of marketers to convince people they need our product. What happens with a recession? Tons of them get laid off. With an extended recession? They don't get hired again.
TIS A GOOD DAY TO

BE AN ENGINEER.
(sorry to those who were expecting a different ending)

Re:It's in their best interests

[toddestan]

Many boards now come with digital outputs, so I really don't care how bad the analog outputs might be.

Re:It's in their best interests

[AK Marc]

When I, as a consumer, feel overwhelmed or confused about a product choice, I usually respond by simply purchasing nothing at all.

I don't believe you. Someone steals your car. You go to the dealer. You get a confusing choice of turbo Diesel engine, where it gets great mileage, but uses a different fuel. Or the hybrid, where you know there's some issue with battery replacement, but it gets better mileage than the gasoline powered choice and doesn't run on diesel, which is called smelly and is not at every fuel station. Or there's the regular gasoline version, which is a little cheaper, but uses more mileage. But, because of trouble with Diesel, and the expense of batteries, might be a better choice. So, what do you pick if you are confused? Are you honestly stating that when you are without a car and need one, confusion will result in you walking away without an automobile? I don't believe you. At a minimum, you'll lie to yourself until you believe you aren't confused "I just don't like Diesel, so we'll take that off the list" and "the battery problem will be fixed by the time they need replacement" or whatever it takes to narrow down the choice even when you don't really understand.

But to assert that someone will walk away from a necessity seems absurd. And whatever you'd do for a necessity, is what others do with other more common purchases and you might as well subconsciously for other choices.

Re:It's in their best interests

[Max Romantschuk]

When it comes to bang for your buck a dedicated D/A converter with an integrated headphone amp is probably the best upgrade you can make. One of my co-workers has one, and it blows any integrated headphone amp out of the water.

The D/A on my box's integrated sound might be good in theory, but the interference it picks up... just abysmal. So taking the sound out of the computer digitally and using a dedicated converter (or a USB sound card) does make sense.

Pro audio sound cards to still matter though. My M-Audio Delta 1010 is still amazing compared to most hardware. If you need a lot of channels in and out you still need dedicated hardware. For games and movies? Not so much IMHO.

Re:It's in their best interests

[TheEyes]

That's why I bought AMD for my last two builds; I can't understand Intel's naming scheme, so I don't bother to try. Both the red and blue CPU teams are fast enough now unless I'm building for a very specific need, so I just go with the one that requires the least brainpower to know what I'm getting... ...that way I can spend all my time figuring out what the different GPU numbers mean. :)

Re:It's in their best interests

[bami]

What i've noticed with on-board sound is that after a while, it starts picking up garbage signal from the processor and amplifies that, mostly because it is sharing ground with the rest of the motherboard. So you can hear 5000 hz buzzing over the line-out or speakers when the processor is busy. I've noticed this with those realtek HD sound things on 3 different PC's with different audio chipsets.

Standalone audio cards probably have some filters for that, on top of better DAC's.

Price drops

[glittermage]

I do care when Intel ships more cores. The price of 'old" cores drop and I get better value for my $$$.

No.

[bertoelcon]

The headline asked a question, I answered it.

Ideally the best metric would be

[snooo53]

Some combination that measures both how many operations per second, and how much power it's going to take to do said operations (i.e. Watts/computing unit). I don't know if even FLOPS is sufficient anymore to describe current computing tasks. Heck, I'd be happy with any sort of standardization.

Re:Ideally the best metric would be

[Surt]

The problem is that only a fraction of customers who care at all would be happy with any given benchmark. And if all you do is read email and run trivial processing tasks (the largest customer base) there's no meaningful metric because things have been fast enough for a long time now.

Re:Ideally the best metric would be

[Twinbee]

Don't worry. Microsoft, along with multiple abstraction layers (through the browser etc.), and slower interpreted programming languages to the rescue!!

Re:Not at all

[Anonymous Coward]

One core is sufficient for 99% of office workstations that only run a browser and MS Office applications.

Absolutely not. There are so many crappy applications that will max out a single processor doing stupid things (like rendering javascript on a webpage), that a 2nd core is very very useful.

Since most software still isn't multithreaded, a crappy application will only max out one core, allowing you to still get work done.

Re:Not at all

[mikael_j]

Multicore plus enough RAM is generally a lot better performance-wise than singlecore plus low amount of RAM and an SSD.

If you're having performance issues in everyday office use that go away when switching from a regular hard drive to an SSD you could just try accepting that these days you need 1+ gigs of RAM instead of trying to implement a bunch of workarounds that don't address the actual problem (that your computer keeps swapping out stuff to the hard drive because you're running out of RAM).

Unfortunately it's pretty common to see regular office desktops with fast multicore CPUs and ridiculously low amounts of RAM (I've seen C2D 2+ GHz CPUs coupled with 512 megs of RAM, it ran slower than a low-end P4 with 2 gigs of RAM).

The Onion Said it Best.

[Anonymous Coward]

F@(# Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!

Re:The Onion Said it Best.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that you're allowed to write "fuck" on the Internet, right? You don't have to censor it like that.

My gaming system is...

[mindwhip]

... overdue for its 2 year processor and motherboard upgrade. It is overdue because when I started to look at what processor met my ideal performance/cost ratio it was impossible to figure out.

I don't have time spare to sit with a spreadsheet and a matrix of 30 different processors to work it out so I won't be upgrading now until something breaks. You lost a sale Intel, and I will have to pay more attention to system requirements of games for a while.

I would guess I am not the only one choosing not to buy because its so unclear...

Re:My gaming system is...

[PrecambrianRabbit]

In my opinion CPU model numbers are a paragon of sanity compared to GPU numbers.

With intel Core iX branded CPUs, the model number looks something like iX-NNN. You can ignore the X pretty much entirely. From there, increasing NNNs indicate generally increasing performance and "features" (hyperthreading, turbo boost, cores). At that point, it's pretty much just picking a budget and buying the most expensive thing within that price range (I promise I'm not getting a kickback from Intel for saying that :-D). Right now it looks like the 875K is the most powerful CPU you can get before prices go insane

With GPUs... well, let's look at the Radeon series. 4xxx vs. 5xxx indicates DX 10 vs. 11, so I guess I can deal with that. The xxx basically indicates performance within a generation, but to compare between generations you basically have to go look at benchmarks.

Of course, if you just want to play games, pretty much any current-gen CPU will do pretty darn well. If you actually care about the tech, then the research is fun. And if your job depends on the research, then it's probably worth doing ;-)

Re:They make perfect sense to a ph.d. professor

[Anonymous Coward]

What about telling him the truth ?

The sequence number is assigned by the marketing department in order to confuse you. By making it harder for you to know what you're buying, they decrease your bargaining power which allow them to charge you more.

I have no idea what's good anymore

[Chewbacon]

I remember the clockspeed race and it was much simpler to decide what CPU you needed when looking at system requirements. Just a week ago I was looking at a game's requirements and had no idea if my CPU met them. If I were to upgrade, I wouldn't know which CPU would satisfy the requirements. I'm pretty handy with computers and I find picking a processor with today's marketing daunting, I can imagine being totally in the dark if I knew little about computers. Intel could do a better job indicating which CPU is better than the other and letting you know what you're buying.

Re:I have no idea what's good anymore

[qbel]

Wow, you took the words out of my mouth man. I have been using computers all my life, and the gigahertz race made sense back then.. Now? Lol... I realized I might as well give up trying to stay with it because you only need so much power to run Wordpad, Excel, watch DVDs/movies and surf the web. I just don't feel like it is worth the time commitment to know what's what. I spent 400 bucks on my laptop, and it does everything I need (HD video, compiling code, photoshop, opening 40+ tabs), is ridiculously fast and stable, has all the space I could ask for, and is now turning a year old. I think it has 2 cores? Maybe?

I should probably admit I feel really ashamed whenever I think about upgrading.. Mostly because I end up on NewEgg, then find myself spending 4+ hours googling every piece of hardware with the terms "TomsHardware" and "Guru3D" before it. Please tell me I'm not alone...

The real story

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't just that the sequence numbers are out of order...

But that the differences in processor performance are largely irrelevant anymore. Who cares if it's 4/6/8 cores/hyperthreading/gigawhatzitz. The bottom line is that all of them are ridiculously fast. You would do far better putting your money into just about any other component.

Yes, many users do care

[bobcat7677]

The number of cores and the speed per core becomes vitally important when you start doing virtualization. Since Windows 7 has this out of the box and Macs use it all over the place and everybody and their cousin are running VMware (or insert your favorite VM environment here), yes, I think alot of people care. That's not even starting to talk about the server space where almost everything is virtualized these days and more cores can mean more VMs (especially on Hyper-V).

I don't want to leave the enthusiasts out, so I will just say for their benefit that seeing all those core graphs lined up in task manager is a major rush and should not be discounted as users look to buy processors (though I guess Intel has that covered with "hyper-threading":P

They are just late to the party

[DeadboltX]

Nvidia and ATI have been giving their graphics cards arbitrary numbers for years.

Is a 330m better than a 220m? maybe.
What about a 9600 vs an 8800? who knows.

Intel didn't invent the random product model numbering scheme, they are just joining the ranks.

Re:They are just late to the party

[Lueseiseki]

When you kinda grasp how they do it, it's not so hard.

If I'm looking at an ATI card with the number given as 5850, I know that it's part of the current generation ( 5### ) and is a pretty high end card card ( #850 ).

If I see 4350, I'll know it's from the previous generation of cards ( 4### ) and it is an entry level or HTPC card.

It's kinda hard to really know whether an ATI's 4650 is greater than a nvidea 9800GT though, but I think the real difficulty comes from trying to know how much a generation of cards improves from its last generation. (4350 vs 5350 for example)

Lies, damn lies, and CPU speed numbers

[Locke2005]

If the chip can't run all the cores at full speed due to heat/power considerations and therefore either throttles back each core's speed or disables some cores under heavy load, than core counts are really just a deceptive pissing contest, aren't they?

Re:Lies, damn lies, and CPU speed numbers

[JoeMerchant]

If the chip can't run all the cores at full speed due to heat/power considerations and therefore either throttles back each core's speed or disables some cores under heavy load, than core counts are really just a deceptive pissing contest, aren't they?

Depends, performance is much more multi-dimensional than it used to be.... if you have an occasional operation that can parallelize to use 24+ threads, it might be advantageous to get a dual socket motherboard with a couple of the new 6 core hyper-threading processors - even if they throttle back to 1/2 speed, you're still getting a 6x+ speedup compared to single core.

Personally, for today's software mix, I like the throttling cores, most stuff chokes a single thread so having the ability to run that single core faster is valuable. Then you can look at applications like video transcoding where you want as many cores as you can get...

Bring back the good old days of MIPS!

[jayveekay]

Misleading Indicator of Performance Statistic was the worthless number we had back then, and we liked it!

One guess why

[Locke2005]

Have you considered that the reason the processor numbers tell you nothing is that ALL the chips are fabbed with 6 cores and the ones that have one or two bad cores in testing have 2 cores disabled and are sold as quads?

I couldn't care less

[adenied]

When I decide a new computer (usually because the current one is out of warranty) I just buy whatever the newest Mac laptop is that seems to fit my use case. I might look at the specs a bit but frankly I couldn't tell you what processor is in the one I currently have.

I used to care a lot about this. When I was in high school. I have a lot more interesting things to care about and I think 99% of the public does too. I'm not trying to diss anyone here. If being a processor geek is your thing, more power to you. But I think people decide for whatever reason that at some point they need a new computer and just buy whatever fits their price bracket and feature needs.

If I was say, building a huge server farm, or spec'ing out computers for a big group of people I'd obviously do a lot more homework. But those are edge cases in the grand scheme of things.

Re:Not at all

[Surt]

And with a quad core system, you can run 3 crappy applications and still have a responsive system! A hex core system will let you run an outrageous 5 crappy applications!

Here's a short summary of TFA.

[seeker_1us]

Total CPU performance is now a three dimensional issue: architecture, number of cores, and clock speed. A one dimensional sequence number can't specify three dimensions, and that you have to actually look at the chip specifications.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Here's a short summary of TFA.

[mindwhip]

Yeah but Intel need to label the chips with those 3 things for it to work rather than make up a random number and leave you scrambling around looking for useful info...

Re:One Core at 24GHZ

[Surt]

They stopped upping the ghz because they ran into a power spike. GHz will likely start advancing again after the next breakthrough in device power. It'll happen, it's just not obvious when.

Re:They make perfect sense to a ph.d. professor

[macshit]

Yeah, that's the rub. The premise of this story, that "average" computer users probably have little clue about many technical details, is no doubt true, but the question Intel is really interested in is "how much information can we hide from the buyer, using the excuse that they aren't interested."

This affects slashdotters a lot, as many of us can usefully use such information, but still mostly buy the same hardware that all the mouth-breathers do. So if Intel starts a campaign of obfuscation under the guise of helping the clueless, we're the ones that suffer...

[and of course the other reason Intel is probably muttering about this is that currently AMD has a lead in "lots of cores at low prices"... and Intel really really wants to say "oh but that doesn't matter!"]

Re:Not at all

[Kjella]

Since most software still isn't multithreaded, a crappy application will only max out one core, allowing you to still get work done.

Not to mention letting you kill said shitty application/process without waiting five minutes.

Re:Not at all

[mikael_j]

Sadly, we dont.

There are many situations in which modern operating systems will gladly let a single process hog a CPU core (it's often not "pure" CPU loads but the CPU ends up pegged due to other issues and everything else grinds to a halt).

Re:Not at all

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Actually, I (sometimes) use my quad-core to run a virtual machine on two cores, and the native OS on the other two cores. That means that both OSes can potentially run one crappy application and neither becomes unresponsive.

Any fewer than four cores, and it's iffy, for exactly that reason.

Windows Experience Index

[juventasone]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Windows Experience Index (WEI). It may not be as exhaustive as the benchmarks many of us read, but it is very easy to understand. I've yet to see any manufacturer or retailer advertise a WEI score, but it would be a great help to consumers if they all did. Anyone could easily compare offerings from Intel and AMD, or see the significance of discrete graphics or SSDs (without even knowing what they are).

Re:They make perfect sense to a ph.d. professor

[aquila.solo]

THEY CAME FIRST for the marketing department, and I said "They're on the third floor, next to legal. Tell them I sent you."

Yes, I care!

[BLKMGK]

I want 6 cores and if possible I'd like it unlocked for a reasonable price. Their current "extreme" 6core is actually looking attractive to me but I keep waiting for the price to come down. I had hoped that a new 6core would come in that would be reasonably priced and that even if locked could be clocked up pretty good. But at $880+ I dunno' - I will wait for the street price to hit before I get interested.

Why do I want 6cores? Because I compress video pretty often and it's an hours long chore while keeping the quality and resolution high - file sizes plummet though. Hi Def video compression is intensive on the CPU and I often see rates as low as 13fps when compressing. That's on a 920 clocked to 4.2ghz. On water this thing hits 80C with a good sized radiator and multiple fans - I'll be moving to a bigger radiator soon in hopes of solving that. A 6core would give me at least a 30% increase in speed if not more depending on if Hyperthreading continues to buy me anything (it does now). If this new CPU can hit speeds like the unlocked Extreme and hits NewEgg for say $750 I'll score one but not when it's within $100 or so of the unlocked Extreme.

Frankly, if there was decent code to chain multiple machines together to process video I'd try that but the last I saw of code to do that it was old and not worth my time. Since I also happen to be doing this on Windows chances of finding good code to slave machines together is even slimmer.

So yeah - I care and I agree this new number scheme SUX! But hey in the end it's the performance I care about and how high it will clock without melting down. These Extremes are sick fast but wow are they pricey :-(

P.S. Were it not for video processing I'd still consider a C2D just fine or maybe an overclocked i5. This 920 STOMPED my 3.8GHZ C2D though so was well worth the investment and it has also beaten a few dual XEON Macs :-)

Re:Yes, I care!

[aronschatz]

What are you using for rendering?

Slap a moderate GPU in your system and use it to render. You'll save LOADs of time over the CPU. Really, the GPU is a DSP that can get the job done for rendering tasks.

Re:Yes, I care!

[BLKMGK]

Been there, done that - my CPU was faster and I get more options. I use x.264 to compress my video - meGUI is my frontend of choice. I have tested GPU renders in the past that leveraged CUDA and my CPU beat them - this was even before I went to liquid cooling too! I'll grant that a GTX275 is no barn burner but it's no slouch either and when I purchased it was fairly expensive. I'm willing, and will, look at CUDA rendering again but frankly if it's not combined with the CPU then it's worthless to me. Using both together would make the most sense IMO. x.264 is free too which is nice!

Oh and yeah I run 64bit x.264 and have CoreAVC onboard too but it's really no help. Neither is using an SSD - the bottleneck IS the CPU. x.264 has slowly gotten better for sure though but a BD still takes hours although 3 hours sure beats the 20+ hours I used to get n my C2D!

Has Been Happening for a While

[Deorus]

It wasn't until recently when I had issues with Microsoft Virtual PC because my BIOS (which had already been upgraded once) was bugged and would not enable hardware virtualization that I realized that my CPU (an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600) was one of the very few with hardware virtualization back when I bought it, as the processor models directly above and below this one did not have it, and I bought this CPU assuming that any "nodern" (2007) quad core CPU would have it, I chose this particular model based on price alone.

Intel says model numbers hurt, help the customer.

[InvisiBill]

I always loved posting this pic for a forum friend who worked at Intel.

http://images.invisibill.net.nyud.net/intelmodelnumbers.jpg

Re:What I care is...

[Nadaka]

For games? AMD is more than enough. Modern games are graphics bound.

An AMD 955 is more than enough cpu for games and will come priced at around $250 less than an intel i7 920 system.

For intel CPU's the 920 is the only one that has a price/performance ratio similar to AMD.

Re:Yes

[BLKMGK]

Umm, my overclocked 920 beat my (high but not highest end at the time) NVIDIA GPU at encoding and it offers me FAR more options for how I want the video encoded rather than a few out of the box profiles. That said sure I'd love to use my GPU to encode - WITH my CPU. So far it's been either or but if you've got a solution by all means share it. Until then I'll also keep piling on more cores and more clock.

Re:Not at all

[BitZtream]

I use an OS that doesn't suck, I can in fact, have an app trying to use 100% of the CPU and STILL manage to get work done because it won't let it! Its called a 'pre-emptive multitasking OS'. Maybe you should try one. Not sure what OS you're using that doesn't do this but its gotta be pretty useless now days.

One core is more than enough for almost everyone. Office apps don't really use a lot of CPU, even Office 2010. What web pages do you use that you run so much JS that you notice it running? Contrary to what Mozilla and Google are ranting about, JS speed hasn't been an issue for years, even if its the only change they've made to their browsers recently worth mentioning.

Contrary to popular belief, most people aren't trying to run quake in javascript. Your argument is dumb as it stands.

You should have referenced flash. You're argument would still be dumb, but at least you'd come up with a reason to need more CPU.

Everybody has a computer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're buying a computer, you're probably replacing one. Why? Because the old one doesn't do something that you need done (the other possibility is that your present computer is junked up and it's easier to replace than to fix).

You will buy a computer that will do what you need done plus provide a bit of headroom for future applications. Past that your choice will depend on two things:
1 - the skill of the salesperson trying to maximize his/her commission.
2 - your ego.

There are lots of people who will buy the maximum cores they can get for the same reason they will buy the most expensive car they can get the bank to lend them the money to buy. Sadly, I suspect there are more of those people than the ones who will buy only what they are likely to need in the life of the computer.

Re:What I care is...

[BitZtream]

Its doubtful AMD will ever regain the performance lead again, Intel was lazy, lost one round and learned they had to bust their ass cause AMD was going to push them.

From here on out, barring complacency by AMD, the best you can expect is that AMD will be close to Intel in performance for most things, better at a select few, and almost invariably cheaper resulting in more performance for a given cost, but not being capable of producing the fastest raw speed or the lowest power draw. Intel will win around the board at the raw numbers and will continue to only occasionally have AMD do some things better.

I hope the two of them continue doing exactly what they are doing for at least 10 more years. They are a duo-oply(? spellcheck failure!@$!@$!$), but one that competes and so far appears to be providing benefits to consumers rather than price fixing with AMD and ripping us off while they sit on their laurels.

Re:One Core at 24GHZ

[Benaiah]

Back in 2002 a lecturer for Computer Systems Engineering explained to me why the GHz race was ending (did end). Apparently the engineers were running into issues with clock propogation through the chip. As the leading edge of a clock propagates through a chip at say 10Ghz the wavelength is below 10mm. Thus before the falling edge the signal would have only travelled 5mm. Different travel paths and instruction times was leading the engineers to impossible asynchronous errors. It was predicted that with modern chip design would peak at 5GHz.
They never quite got that high but he was close nontheless.

Re:Future Compatibility

[Mad Merlin]

PCI is nowhere close to being fast enough for USB 3, USB 2 sure, but not USB 3. Also, even a single 7200 RPM SATA hard drive can outstrip the bandwidth provided via a PCI slot nowadays. On the other hand, PCIe is a totally different story, and just about every motherboard these days includes at least a couple PCIe slots.

Re:Ancedotal Evidence

[TheLink]

> My current system is a C2D 1.8GHz E6300 that's now pushing 4 years of age,
> yet according to all the benchmarks I've seen by Anntech, Tom's Hardware and others, my performance results are less then 20 percent below the latest/greatest CPU's.

While you probably don't need to upgrade your CPU, I don't see how your CPU can be only 20% slower than the latest and greatest. Even for single-threaded stuff.

See: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/61?vs=142

Note: I'm even comparing the 2.33GHz C2D to the latest and greatest, since the 1.8GHz one isn't listed. But I'm sure the 2.33GHz C2D should be a bit faster than your 1.8GHz C2D.

For graphically intensive games, though the difference in the average fps would not be as high, the difference in the minimum fps might be, and that might be more important in many real-world scenarios.

In many ways it's quite impressive what Intel has done with the x86. The equivalent of a hypersonic flying pig beating the less "ugly" MIPS and Alphas ;).

Assuming nothing breaks, my next upgrade is more likely to be an SSD than CPU, GPU, RAM or HDD. I'm just waiting for the prices to go down to more reasonable levels (and the number of bug reports to dwindle as well ;) ).

6 core better than 4 for rendering

[mrjezza]

Hey All, I can say from my 1st hand experience that rendering the same scene in Maya with Mental Ray on win7 has improved going from 4 core to 6 core. A good percentage in speed increase and saved time. If you don't use a "well designed" multi-threaded app then save your money I guess. For pro 3D more cores the better. Cheers J

Re:One Core at 24GHZ

[Surt]

They did get that high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerPC_processors#POWER_processors

I believe IBM still has plans to release a 6ghz processor.

'Good enough'

[SchizoDuckie]

Since there are 1.5ghz processors and memory chips are about the price of poststamps, i tell all my friends and family to buy the *cheapest* computer they can find with the biggest harddisk. Everything from 1.5ghz and up is just 'good enough' to do anything a normal consumer will ever do. That's never failed.

No

[Sycraft-fu]

And a minimal amount of research will tell you this. Intel's 6 core chips come off their new 32nm lines, since space and power are a premium. Intel's 4 core chips come off their much more prevalent 45nm lines. They are completely different processes and thus one is not sold as the other.

Intel has pretty good yields, they traditionally have, and thus don't have a real reason to do that sort of thing. It is more economical to fab quads on the more available 45nm process than to make them out of any failed 6 units.

The process of choosing a CPU never changed

[dingen]

The process of choosing a CPU (or any component for that matter) has never really changed. This is what you do:

1. 1) Get a list of all recent CPU models and prices
2. 2) Sort the list by price descending
3. 3) Ignore the top of the list, because those prices are just ridiculous. There will be a point in the list where prices suddenly drop to more decent levels
4. 4) Pick a model around that point in the list (the highest one you can afford, but not so high the price becomes ridiculous again)

Any other spec is just marketing.

Can you show examples?

[Sycraft-fu]

Everything I see shows that modern OSes not only don't have an overhead with more cores, it helps things. Reason is what OSes really have is a heavy context switching overhead. If a processor is doing something, and the OS needs it to do something else, it has to generate an interrupt, push everything on to the stack, switch to the kernel, switch to the net process, etc. It is a hefty overhead. However that all goes away if instead multiple things run at the same time on hardware. They don't switch contexts, they just keep running.

This is the reason why web/DB heavy servers like to have lots of cores, even if less powerful. Sun's new chips are designed with that in mind. Each core can handle 8 threads in hardware, meaning it acts like a 64-core CPU though only having 8 actual cores. Why? Context switching. The tasks it normally deals with are not high load, but they switch around a lot. The more than can run side-by-side from the OSes perspective, the less overhead and the more efficient use of processor resources.

In a desktop the tasks are more intense so it is less useful to have lots of threads/CPU (currently 2 is the highest in the Core i3/5/7 series) but more cores are still quite useful. It allows for more things to happen at the same time, from an OS perspective, and lowers overhead.

You notice too, using a multi-core, multi-threaded system. Things are damn responsive.

Gaming is changing

[Sycraft-fu]

Turns out in modern games, a lot of shit happens at the same time. While this was traditionally coded as a bigass while loop because systems were singe thread, it doesn't have to be. You can thread all that shit out and have the game engine do multiple things at once. It is still being worked on, but it is getting much better. Most very modern (as released this year or perhaps last year) games make extremely good use of two cores to the point that many require it. They can fully load both, no problem. A smaller number, but increasing amount, can make good use of 3 or 4 cores. Game designers are learning how to code in parallel, tools are developing to make this work better, etc.

Games are already parallel and are only going to get more so.

Ummm, they do

[Sycraft-fu]

If I go to Intel's page for the i7-970, which is easy to find they list: # of Cores, # of Threads, Clock Speed, Turbo Frequency, Bus/Core Ratio, QPI Speed, # of QPI Links, Instruction Set, Instruction Set Extensions, Lithography, Max TDP, VID Voltage Range and a whole bunch of other shit. Everything you could want.

So, what is easier:

1) Call it the "Core i7-970" which gives you a bit of info about where it falls in the series, and an easy to lookup number for their site to find more info as needed.

or

2) Call it the "Core i7 3.2/3.46 GHz 6/12 core/thread 12 MB 4.8 GT/s QPI SSE4.2 AES-NI 32nm 130 W" which is extremely confusing, and doesn't fit in most product headlines?

Don't care, 2007 was fast enough

[nOw2]

Unless I'm timing them, I'm hard pushed to tell the difference between my personal computers. I have 2.0GHz C2D, 2.6GHz Core i7 deskop and 2.4Ghz Core i5 mobile. They all do everything I need.

Today, the graphics chip makes a bigger difference to me: I have two Macs with the same CPU but one has an ATI chip and the other Intel GMA. Guess what, the Intel GMA drives me crazy.

I guess I'm waiting for the next generation of CPU intensive killer apps.

Go Intel!!!!

[Que914]

http://xkcd.com/670/

Make -jX

[malloc]

6 cores. Do You Care?

Written like someone who's never heard of 'make -j'. Seriously, anybody that compiles stuff wants more cores, and if you ever reach a point were disk IO is the bottleneck just throw in an SSD.

Random project on my box:

make clean; time make -j8
Real: 4.3s

make clean; time make -j1
Real: 14.7s

Compiling is an inherently parallelizable task.