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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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).

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: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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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: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.

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."

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...

[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: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 ;) ).

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.