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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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