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

[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

[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

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Jeremy Clarkson school of Computer Science.

POWERRRRRRRR!

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.

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: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.

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...

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.

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?

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?

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: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."