>>  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).
> 
> Nothing, they just buy them because it sounds better than before (after 
> all, they can't make the clock rate much higher anymore).  A bit like 
> how a phone with a 5MP camera sells better than one with a 2MP camera, 
> even though the photos are just as crappy and you can hardly blow it up 
> to A4 to print out.

It's completely true! My mum bought a 7MP camera and was bragging about 
how much better it was than my little 3MP camera...

...until we looked at the actual pictures, and discovered that mine was 
vastly superior. Funny how having a 0.2 mm lense results in awful 
picture quality, eh?

For what most people do, the single limiting factor in apparent speed is 
the HD and the Internet link. But while you could print a page of stuff 
about rotational latency and cache size, it's easier to slap a big "Core 
i7 3.0 GHz" sticker on the front instead.

Big numbers sell.

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Forget about that: Computer games are like POV-Ray scenes - they 
> invariably grow with the available computing power, to bog it down again 
> to exactly that speed where it's /barely/ acceptable...

  But the thing is: Regardless of how many cores you add to your computer,
the games will quickly reach a roof where they won't get any faster.

  I'm willing to bet that you won't see any significant improvement in
framerates between a 2-core and a 6-core computer, which otherwise has
identical hardware.

  The main reason is that the GPU sets the limit, not the CPU. If the CPU
gets fast enough, it will just sit idle while the GPU renders a frame.
Adding more cores is not going to help that.

  Another reason is that, as I said, the computational capacity of the
game engine will most probably not grow linearly with the number of cores.
Performance which is completely linear compared to the number of cores is
a really hard problem. I would bet that with a game engine adding one more
core is probably only going to speed up calculations by 50% or something
like that.

  If you want more speed, the cores themselves would need to be faster.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible wrote:
> But, for reasons unknown, desktop motherboards never support multiple CPUs...

I dunno. I go down to Frye's Electronics and they have a bunch. They're all 
hundreds of dollars more than the single-CPU boards...

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Warp wrote:
>   So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
> multithreaded rendering or video editing.

Photo editting. Video encoding. Background stuff like virus scans while 
you're trying to get actual work done. :-)

And server-type stuff: compiling, SQL servers, web servers, virtual 
machines, etc.

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.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Invisible wrote:
> Most of the PCs round here, it seems, are in fact limited by RAM 
> capacity, HD access speed, and most significantly network latency. 

My boss bought a quad-core Mac with SSDs. A few weeks later I asked how it 
worked out.  He said "I never wait for anything." :-)

With several SATA drives, it's nice to be able to copy at 80MBps between two 
different pairs of drives at once.  Way nicer than lame-ass IDE.

And my net here is nicely peppy. At 12Mbps, I'm almost always maxing out 
someone else's connection before my own. I can suck down an entire CD worth 
of data in about 15 minutes, faster than driving into work to pick it up.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> 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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Warp wrote:
>   Does the average computer user both own a photo editing software which
> supports multithreading and use it to its full extent?

I dunno. Who is an average programmer? :-)  If you do a "sharpen" or 
something and it's written to use multiple threads to do so, you'll use all 
the cores.

>   Niche market, i'd say. 

Sure. Almost everything in computers is a niche market in some sense. :-)

> Even those who do video encoding could probably
> do it just as well with a dual-core or even a single-core.

Of course. Just not as fast. Everyone who downloads videos in the first 
place could do it over dialup, too. (Except these are my own videos I'm 
transcoding, of course)

>> Background stuff like virus scans while 
>> you're trying to get actual work done. :-)
> 
>   Virus scanners mostly stress disk I/O,

Sure. I just meant like other background stuff one tends to accumulate.

>   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.

Agreed. I was just giving samples of why one might want more cores that you 
might not have thought of.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> So there are hex-core Operons now, eh?
> 
>   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).
> 
> [...]
> 
>   So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
> multithreaded rendering or video editing.

Many web browsers are now becoming multithreaded or using multiple
processes. So now you'll be able to use browser tabs, each with some
bloated Javascript monstrosity, without any of them slowing down!

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Even those who do video encoding could probably
> > do it just as well with a dual-core or even a single-core.

> Of course. Just not as fast.

  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.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Many web browsers are now becoming multithreaded or using multiple
> processes. So now you'll be able to use browser tabs, each with some
> bloated Javascript monstrosity, without any of them slowing down!

  I'd call that a complete waste of resources and money. :)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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