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It's finally happened. I don't foresee a time where I need more CPU power in my desktop. I could use more memory, faster (and larger) SSDs, faster GPUs with mor
by Beltiras 7y ago
It's finally happened. I don't foresee a time where I need more CPU power in my desktop. I could use more memory, faster (and larger) SSDs, faster GPUs with more TCs (althou I'm actually good for that too mostly), more bulk data storage on platter disks but honestly I'm good for CPU for all my needs. Here's why: Most of the cores on my Ryzen 7 are idle most of the time. There are intense periods where I need to compile stuff where they max out but these are relatively short. Cup-of-coffee short. Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. Should I ever need more CPU I don't need an order of magnitude more, I need orders of magnitude more. Those are easily procured through AWS or Azure or some other cloud provider. Same with GPUs. I might make a training run for a NN on my desktop to hypothesis test something that I would then run for longer hours on cloud hardware. It's never going to be cost-efficient for me to scale up with any sort of ownership of the hardware. Of course I'm going to buy the new monster at some point but it will be due to hardware failure, not due to me needing the new shiny.
- flohofwoe 7y ago> Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. The main reason for this is most likely that all current-gen game consoles are using 8 CPU cores, so this is basically the "baseline" for games right now. If the next generation of game consoles increases CPU core count, the core usage for games running on PC will most likely also go up accordingly.
- ebg13 7y ago> Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max Large numbers of cores have never been useful for gaming, but overall thread performance has. Right now the major bottleneck for high end gaming is GPUs because display pixel counts have gone through the roof with high frame rate VR and 5k monitors, but keep in mind that the current most powerful graphics card for games (Nvidia 2080 Ti) is over a year old, still costs over $1000, and is not about to be replaced yet because, just like Intel, NVidia hasn't had competition at the top in a long time. If AMD can bring this success to the graphics space, maybe that will change too.
- pmjordan 7y agoAMD's Navi is looking to be competing quite well with NVIDIA in the mid-range/enthusiast space, and shortly in the mid-to-low-end segment with the imminent RX5500. I suspect it won't be long until the empire strikes back in this case though: NVIDIA also uses TSMC for fabbing its GPUs, so they too will soon be shipping 7nm GPUs, with all the intrinsic advantages of that node. Of course, pricing of those new products will hopefully be strongly influenced by AMD's resurgence. (And, supposedly, Intels re-entry into the GPU market, but I remain skeptical this will make much of a dent for a few years yet.)
- robbyt 7y ago"64k ought to be enough for anyone"
- Beltiras 7y agoYou are just being silly. I didn't even say that computing power was enough for me, just that I didn't need more on my desk.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoGive it a year and developers will make sure your software slows down enough to make more CPU power seem like a worthwhile investment.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoDepends I was talking to a Mate who does Java development yesterday about the rebuild times in eclipse -costing an hour or two a week per developer.