5 ms·
Most users won't get any effect at all unless they're playing top-end video games. Anyway, I thought by now we would have 16-core processors.... I don't unders
by duaneb 14y ago
Most users won't get any effect at all unless they're playing top-end video games.
Anyway, I thought by now we would have 16-core processors.... I don't understand why the "default" one is still two cores.
- bdonlan 14y agoDesktop applications aren't really ready to take advantage of that many cores yet - parallelism is hard, and the vast majority of desktop users probably can't keep even two cores saturated most of the time. There's also thermal dissipation limitations, plus with that many cores you need to have a lot of bandwidth to memory to keep them saturated. And, of course, the more circuitry you have the lower your yield, so the cost of a $BIGNUM-core CPU would be quite high. So there's no real reason to add tons of cores to a single CPU. Meanwhile, on the server side of things, there's only so far you want to go with multiple cores before it's worth thinking about just buying more than one server. Multiple servers has advantages when it comes to reliability, helps scale out resources other than CPU (eg, memory bandwidth, hard disk bandwidth, or NIC bandwidth), and of course this forces you into an architecture that scales out much further than just adding more sockets to the same machine does. And, of course, using the same basic product lines (modulo clock rating and the like) as desktop chips reduces cost too. It's not really worth adding tons of cores to the same package, when you can always buy multiple CPUs if you really _really_ need tons of cores on one machine.
- CamperBob2 14y agoRunning multiple processes is what multicore CPUs really excel at. When I want to OCR a 500-page .PDF file without hosing other tasks, a quad-core CPU makes a tangible difference.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoActually, there are only a handful of games that can really take advantage of lots of cores. Virtually everything will be faster on a higher clocked dual core than a lower clocked quad (both with HT). There are reasonably priced 16 core AMD chips, and 8 core Intel chips (with HT, they'll actually be faster). I don't think there's much of a market for people who need lots of cores, but are unwilling to build a workstation, since the form factors are the same.
- gaius 14y agoSun was shipping 8-core processors with 8 hardware threads per core in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_processor
- miahi 14y agoMost users cannot multitask very well. Even if they use 3-4 applications in parallel, many just wait for a CPU intensive task in foreground instead of switching to another task.
- sambeau 14y ago"Most users won't get any effect at all unless they're playing top-end video games." I have 14 browser tabs open. Safari is currently using 17 threads. Webprocess is using 10, Pluginprocess is using 22. I shudder to think what those numbers would be if I wasn't running AdBlock. I believe most users would see the effect of more cores.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- duaneb 14y agoActually, I was talking about the single-threaded performance - I agree wholeheartedly that more cores would be a better experience.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoLaunch chrome. Open up 16 tabs. You are now running 16+ processes.
- duaneb 14y agoPrecisely - so why are we still shipping 2-core processors and focusing on single-threaded performance? I would much rather have 16 mediocre cores than 2 really really fast cores.
- duaneb 14y agoEDIT: (apparently I can't edit anymore on HN?) I meant that most users won't see extra performance for single-threaded improvements; I believe that extra cores WILL give better performance.