Warp wrote:

>   I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
> average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
> minority).

Indeed, where I work we have all these shiny new Dell OptiPlex 755 
systems with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz CPUs... and we use them to run 
Word and Excel.

Over 10 years ago, I was running Word and Excel with 486 and Pentium I 
processors. That *was* actually kind of underpowered. But we passed the 
point of being underpowered quite some time ago. Excel isn't notably 
faster on a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo than it is on the dinosaur AMD AthlonXP 
1700+ at my desk. And that's a single-core, 32-bit CPU.

Most of the PCs round here, it seems, are in fact limited by RAM 
capacity, HD access speed, and most significantly network latency. 
Downloading a 200 MB Word document takes a while no matter what CPU you 
have.

>   About the only usage for multiple cores for the masses (rather than for
> very small niche markets) is computer games which support multithreading.

Yeah, just about.

>   However, I wonder if anyone has actually benchmarked how well current
> multithreading-supporting games scale up with increased amount of cores
> (and processors).

I think Tom's Hardware has taken a look at this kind of thing on 
occasion, yes.

> Expecting that doubling the number of cores will double
> the refresh rate of the game is completely unrealistic wishful thinking.

Yes, "most" games are GPU-limited.

> I would be curious to know if anyone has actually benchmarked how much
> games *really* benefit from additional cores.

I don't have the benchmarks to hand, but I'm fairly sure Tom's Hardware 
has looked at this once or twice. (E.g., I vaguely recall an article 
about whether you should upgrade your CPU or your GPU, and which would 
give you the most improvement for the same money.)

>   And of course there's a point after which a game will not benefit at
> all from increased speed. A game refreshing at 100FPS or at 150FPS makes
> absolutely no practical difference.

Ah, but you're forgetting the first rule of 3D graphics: If you add more 
processing power, people will invent new ways to sap it until the thing 
slows to a crawl.

Exhibit A: Crysis.

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