Warp wrote:

>   Fast enough, in most cases. I think memory and I/O speed will be the
> bottleneck at some point, after which the extra cores will be worth a
> paperweight.
> 
>   (It's surprising how much effect memory bus speed has eg. on video
> capturing.)

And this is the other Fun Thing. Given enough CPU cores, you will 
eventually reach a point where the memory subsystem can't actually keep 
up. The result is that the more cores you have, the more time they can 
waste sitting idle.

(As somebody once said, "a supercomputer is a device for turning 
compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems". It seems apt here.)

Long ago when RAM was actually faster than the CPU, having several of 
them seemed like a good idea. Currently the CPU goes way, way faster 
than RAM anyway. Having "more CPU" just makes the problem worse...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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