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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
> > multithreaded rendering or video editing.
> Photo editting.
Does the average computer user both own a photo editing software which
supports multithreading and use it to its full extent?
> Video encoding.
Niche market, i'd say. Even those who do video encoding could probably
do it just as well with a dual-core or even a single-core. The pros who
really need the cores are mostly a niche market (and they also tend to buy
high-end computers because they need TONS of memory and MEGATONS of hard
drive space, not to talk about all the backup storage space. Not the
average joe's computer.)
> Background stuff like virus scans while
> you're trying to get actual work done. :-)
Virus scanners mostly stress disk I/O, which is the main reason why
everything's so laggy during a scan. From the CPU point of view a modern
single-core one handles it just fine, with other processes running at
the same time. Multiple cores (especially more than two) are not going
to make any difference.
> And server-type stuff: compiling, SQL servers, web servers, virtual
> machines, etc.
Most servers work just fine with single-core CPUs, especially if they
are not shared servers (as most servers out there aren't). High-end servers
with many customers may be a different story, but also a niche market
(compared to the *average* user). Those, too, tend to have higher specs
than the average PC.
> I often wind up using at least two cores, and not infrequently three.
> Only while video encoding does something use more than three, altho I
> haven't had a distributed compile so big I could see it using up all the
> cores long enough for it to show.
You are a power user, not an average user. And even you admit that you
seldom need even three cores. More is just a waste.
Well, except when rendering something with povray... :P
--
- Warp
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