3 ms·

I don't think its true that most people do web browsing. Its just an easy generalization to make. The world has thousands of industries and each specialty domai

I don't think its true that most people do web browsing. Its just an easy generalization to make. The world has thousands of industries and each specialty domain has their set of software suites that they need for their business. In my industry (pharma), and I'll adda caveat here that I haven't done a rigorous scientific analysis of every single workload, but off hand, all of our software is heavily dependent on single-thread perf. To be sure, there is some stuff that benefits from multiple cores.. dna sequencing/alignment/processing comes to mind, primarily because we're processing hundreds of GBs of data. But by and large, I would pick a CPU that has better single-thread perf. For our accounting folks who use quickbooks a lot, are not going to benefit "massively" from a high core count. For our facilities team that uses autocad.. again same thing .. I don't find a massive benefit from 10-12+ core systems. Sure you can always on a case-by-case basis invent scenarios which could potentially benefit from more cores, but this massive gain across the board that you claim is a bit of an exaggeration. IMHO/IME/YMMV/$0.02 etc..

rowanG077 7y ago
99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. That's why all of these cheap office pc have i3 processors that are years old. Single threaded performance has only one real advantage at this time and that is gaming. I think multi threading performance is way more important in the real world.
- la_barba 7y ago
  >99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. Again, I don't know if that is true. I'd love to see stats on that. My gut tells me improved single-threaded perf will always be welcome in most software because most data transforms are not not easily parallelizable. Certainly for me, more single threaded perf is always welcome in all the software I use daily.. from office suites to compilers to IDEs to photoshop to soft-PLCs/SCADA/HMI or even when opening a super large excel file with crazy forumlas. I don't think its just gaming. The specifications of budget/cheap computers are not really an indicator of what will or wont benefit from single-threaded perf. Whether the benefit is worth paying for will obviously depend on other factors. For me its a nobrainer.

rowanG077 7y ago

99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. That's why all of these cheap office pc have i3 processors that are years old. Single threaded performance has only one real advantage at this time and that is gaming. I think multi threading performance is way more important in the real world.

la_barba 7y ago
>99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. Again, I don't know if that is true. I'd love to see stats on that. My gut tells me improved single-threaded perf will always be welcome in most software because most data transforms are not not easily parallelizable. Certainly for me, more single threaded perf is always welcome in all the software I use daily.. from office suites to compilers to IDEs to photoshop to soft-PLCs/SCADA/HMI or even when opening a super large excel file with crazy forumlas. I don't think its just gaming. The specifications of budget/cheap computers are not really an indicator of what will or wont benefit from single-threaded perf. Whether the benefit is worth paying for will obviously depend on other factors. For me its a nobrainer.