How many cores do we need

[Marek]

Six cores.....

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/02/23/intel-readies-six-core-chip

 

[InkZ]

lol, let the software catch up! Might be useful in an Enterprise situation, but even the cores on the big sql servers at work hardly get touched.

 

[and0r]

Well we "need" 1 core hehe

 

[Tainted]

10 to 20 or more once Raytracing becomes a reality. Can you imagine the graphics then. None of this trickery going on we have to endure today with rasterisation. Larrabee is supposed to start that ball rolling but it needs massive power.

Otherwise for a home use 2 cores is ideal for everything, even games untill software catches as said.

 

[milkinc13]

when AMD realeased dual core, people were saying that we will never need that many cores. Also I think that adding cores will mean that Moore's Law will remain true for longer

 

[Chaos]

The more the merrier

 

[yeti]

ill be happy with 8 - octocore sounds cool

 

[awaybreaktoday]

More the merrier for my vmware box!!!

 

[Lightnix]

The way it's going at the moment, hardware designers are trying to transition the standard X86 style architecture into a more powerful, more easily scalable multi-core approach, rather than just keeping it at 'this is multi core. It is faster', they're probably going to take this sort of architecture and slowly turn it into a very parallel core, by which time software devs should have figured out how to properly take advantage of such a design.

What this means for us? Eventually, some day, CPU power should grow much faster than it does today. That is of course if such a design methodology takes off.

 

[V|per]

at least 64

 

[NickK]

As always - the problem is getting that data into the cores.

The old issues are still there - to process data you need all the dependent data in the same locale rather than twiddling thumbs until it arrives on the red number 12 bus..

 

[Arthalen]

As always - the problem is getting that data into the cores.

The old issues are still there - to process data you need all the dependent data in the same locale rather than twiddling thumbs until it arrives on the red number 12 bus..

True, although AMD has its integrated Memory Controller and Hypertransport, and Intel will have later this year CSI and the Nehalem chip with integrated memory controller.