Quad core utilisation in mid range systems.

[eyemessiah]

I know a lot of us are going for Q6600s in our mid-range, high bang-for-buck setups at the moment.

What I am wondering is what kind of utilization are people getting out of these quad core chips. What got me thinking was reading about how After Effects really needs 2GB of RAM per core to prevent a memory bottleneck from effectively throttling the CPU.

I was only planning on building a 4GB machine, but then I start thinking maybe I should go with 8, just to get my moneys worth. But then I start thinking about how much memory bandwidth 4 cores operating on 2gbs of RAM each would require, and how much data would need to be lifted from the harddisk and I was beginning to wonder if it would be basically impossible to achieve 4x100% utilization with mid range hardware.

Of course this could just be complete nonsense that I made up on my way to tescos.

Thoughts?

 

[Corasik]

The whole point of lots of memory, is to keep data in memory longer, and put less stress on the hard disk. Hard disks are the slowest part of the computer as it is, so the less they are used the better. Video processing is a good example, there are a lot of stages of processing between the original source, and a processed output, by having lots of ram, all the intermidiate stages can be held in ram, so only the final output needs to be written back to the hard drive.

Or even photo editing. How many steps of undo are there on most photo editing suites.. All that data is best held in ram for best performance. There is no problem supplying "work" for 4 processors, even with quite a modest system.