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Also with CPU performance starting to taper off I think people need to also start think of their computers as longer term investments. I think the 8 core makes

Also with CPU performance starting to taper off I think people need to also start think of their computers as longer term investments. I think the 8 core makes sense. Even my phone has 8 cores now...

zelon88 7y ago
I've been hearing this for a long time, but the "taper" isn't really a taper in all markets. In consumer markets, yes the taper is very real. Infact I bet you could take one $500 machine off the shelf of Wal-Mart every year for the past 5 years and benchmark them all within 15% of each other overall. But it isn't really visible when money is no object. If it's not the cores getting faster it's the core-count going up. Moore's Law is really easy to beat if you focus on making your CPU die's larger instead of their transistors smaller.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Also for at least one part of high perf computing, gaming, the trend has been that more cores now actually count in modern engines. Couple of years ago you wanted a couple of cores but single thread perf was the big thing. Now some modern game engines scale very well beyond 4 cores. Presumably they have shifted to some sort of work-item based system instead of having fixed threads for subsystems (rendering, AI, ...). So upgrading from a 4 to 8 core a few years back was expensive and mostly not worth it for gaming, whereas now it might actually give the huge speedup the core count would indicate (Obviously for gaming this just means moving the bottleneck, but still)
- TheOperator 7y ago
  That's just it. The 12 core system years from now will have barely aged. CPUs will just have gotten larger and more expensive. This is changing a past situation where say a CPU would lose half its value in 3 years. This incentivizes spending big and upgrading infrequently.
NightlyDev 7y ago
CPU performance has increased a lot lately, mainly because of amd. ARM CPUs and x86 are apples and oranges.
maximente 7y ago
assuming computers here means CPUs, honestly i think 70% of this (needing "more processing power") is just marketing and consumerism, 10% is OS bloat and the rest is probably legitimate. i'm sure 100 JPL astrophysicists will pile in here but i've been using an AMD 3.2ghz quad core processor purchased in 2010 for software development in java, scala, clojure and now golang as a daily driver up until today. i've replaced the RAM twice, power supply once, and the video card once. i proudly use linux so i'm not sure what the situation is like with other OSes, so i'll budget some for things like windows "growing" over the years, but it's just not necessary for me to update the processor until it dies.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  I'm doing virtualization workloads. The traditional approach is to use some old servers but there's benefits to having a newer chip in your workstation instead.

Also with CPU performance starting to taper off I think people need to also start think of their computers as longer term investments. I think the 8 core makes sense. Even my phone has 8 cores now...

zelon88 7y ago

I've been hearing this for a long time, but the "taper" isn't really a taper in all markets. In consumer markets, yes the taper is very real. Infact I bet you could take one $500 machine off the shelf of Wal-Mart every year for the past 5 years and benchmark them all within 15% of each other overall. But it isn't really visible when money is no object. If it's not the cores getting faster it's the core-count going up. Moore's Law is really easy to beat if you focus on making your CPU die's larger instead of their transistors smaller.

alkonaut 7y ago
Also for at least one part of high perf computing, gaming, the trend has been that more cores now actually count in modern engines. Couple of years ago you wanted a couple of cores but single thread perf was the big thing. Now some modern game engines scale very well beyond 4 cores. Presumably they have shifted to some sort of work-item based system instead of having fixed threads for subsystems (rendering, AI, ...). So upgrading from a 4 to 8 core a few years back was expensive and mostly not worth it for gaming, whereas now it might actually give the huge speedup the core count would indicate (Obviously for gaming this just means moving the bottleneck, but still)
TheOperator 7y ago
That's just it. The 12 core system years from now will have barely aged. CPUs will just have gotten larger and more expensive. This is changing a past situation where say a CPU would lose half its value in 3 years. This incentivizes spending big and upgrading infrequently.

NightlyDev 7y ago

CPU performance has increased a lot lately, mainly because of amd. ARM CPUs and x86 are apples and oranges.

maximente 7y ago

assuming computers here means CPUs, honestly i think 70% of this (needing "more processing power") is just marketing and consumerism, 10% is OS bloat and the rest is probably legitimate. i'm sure 100 JPL astrophysicists will pile in here but i've been using an AMD 3.2ghz quad core processor purchased in 2010 for software development in java, scala, clojure and now golang as a daily driver up until today. i've replaced the RAM twice, power supply once, and the video card once. i proudly use linux so i'm not sure what the situation is like with other OSes, so i'll budget some for things like windows "growing" over the years, but it's just not necessary for me to update the processor until it dies.

TheOperator 7y ago
I'm doing virtualization workloads. The traditional approach is to use some old servers but there's benefits to having a newer chip in your workstation instead.