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So now that all the new Ryzens are here how many cores do we actually need in 2020?

PIII 800 2500KM E6300 Q6600 3570k 4770k i owned a lot of good cpus i think i got a most of my choices ok granted near the end of thier cycle the core count can be felt but i think 8/16 or 16/24 is the sweet spot depending on the budget because i still suspect outside of benchmarks that disabling the fake cores and halving the core count performs better. There were graphs showing this in Frostbite with 6 cores getting better min fps by disabling Hyper Threading.


So 8 would be good with the fake cores off you might be able to OC more? Would love for someone to actually test it as when Zen3 comes with DDR5 thats what i probably plan on replacing the 4770k system. I doubt i could afford 16/24 but its there i suspect thr same anomaly to happen as did 6c Intels in Frostbite they will do better with fake cores off to be native 16c.
 
Jimmy Weirdarms said:
The equivalent now of that price is around £900, due to inflation as the other poster said. Alternatively you can look at it like a £599 price tag today is equivalent to the PS3 launching at £400-£420 back in 2006.
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According to the ONS, wages haven't kept pace with inflation, giving us a real-terms pay decrease (average) for many of the years between 2006 and today. If you want to sell any luxury item you have to make it affordable, and that means in line with people's disposable income.

Frankly I'm sure we both understand that £900 is a ludicrous price. If either console maker set the price that high they'd struggle to sell anything.

If they set the price to £599 even, they are going to get a kicking, and many people won't buy. £599 is still too high.

£499 is much more like it, if you want to shift units.
 
I'm not saying £900 would be in any way an acceptable price, it just goes to shoe how outrageous the £600 price tag was in 2006!

Average wages have risen about 30% over that time AFAICT, whilst they may have stagnated or gone backwards *when adjusted for inflation* the raw figures have not stayed static. So if you want to use the average wage as an index, then that PS3 would be around £800.

Like I say - just goes to show how crazy that price was back then.
 
FoxEye said:
According to the ONS, wages haven't kept pace with inflation, giving us a real-terms pay decrease (average) for many of the years between 2006 and today. If you want to sell any luxury item you have to make it affordable, and that means in line with people's disposable income.

Frankly I'm sure we both understand that £900 is a ludicrous price. If either console maker set the price that high they'd struggle to sell anything.

If they set the price to £599 even, they are going to get a kicking, and many people won't buy. £599 is still too high.

£499 is much more like it, if you want to shift units.
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I’m pretty sure a lot of people would buy. Nvidia want £1250 for GTX2080Ti that will still fall short of the APU that is supposed to be in the Xbox. I’d have no problem paying £599 for the Xbox package as it would be a bargain by comparison. However it’s going to be £499 IMO.
 
Console buyers aren't the same people who buy £1250 nVidia GPUs.

I'm fairly sure that's a safe bet.

Ofc the second group could buy both... but they'd be a tiny % of console owners, same as theyre a tiny % of PC owners (see Steam stats).
 
FoxEye said:
Console buyers aren't the same people who buy £1250 nVidia GPUs.

I'm fairly sure that's a safe bet.

Ofc the second group could buy both... but they'd be a tiny % of console owners, same as theyre a tiny % of PC owners (see Steam stats).
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How tiny? Anyone that knows anything about desktop PC’s will see the Xbox as a bargain.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I expect we might find Sony and Microsoft possibly launching a two versions of each of their consoles - one a "mainstream" model and the other a "performance" model.
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I think the xbox is more or less confirmed to do that already, but the Ps5 is still unknown and nothing points towards a 2nd console
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The PS5 will probably have a smaller chip,so it might be cheaper than the top XBox,but again I don't know whether ReRAM is expensive compared to normal SSDs though.
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yeah it looks to be inbetween the lower end xbox and the top spec one
 
Phil2008 said:
To make money of course and us silly people fall for it, thinking more is better.
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Well... it is.

Software is taking advantage of more cores these days, async and parallel programming frameworks are constantly improving and as we're now no longer in the days where single core speed progresses much, more cores per chip absolutely does offer better performance.

(Edit - whether you need that performance is a different question, and absolutely up to you to decide)
 
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Phil2008 said:
Very true.. Im guessing gaming dont require many cores, but when your working you want it as fast as possible?
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They rarely do sometimes a Crysis tech demo type game will come along that takes advantage but 95% of the games probably can see no more cores than consoles can. Most games are built for both so you can repeat the past and kind of deduct the cpu and thread count they will use in the PS5.

I guess they will use a 8 core 16 thread cpu right? So you would expect games then to use 8 cores really well and lightly load the other 8. This is what i see highly likely to happen they will never make use of above 16 threads unless consoles can.
 
Phil2008 said:
Very true.. Im guessing gaming dont require many cores, but when your working you want it as fast as possible?
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Personally I have a different take on this to the the other response.
In most coding where you want to take advantage of multiple cores, you try your damnedest to ship your work out to them in as agnostic a way as possible, so that it shouldn't matter exactly how many cores there are, just that you use the resources that are available to you as best you can. This is different for some areas, particularly where you require ultra-low latency and you want to be a control freak about the whole system, and in these cases you often want to know exactly what each core is doing and to have set tasks pinned to a core so that even the OS doesn't get to interfere with your work and reschedule it somewhere else. But this is uncommon and I've only seen it used on enterprise storage servers (not saying it's not used elsewhere, that's just where I've seen it used so far).

I think games probably fall somewhere in between the two, and many are already using more cores where they can, it's just that adding more cores may not get you a higher FPS when the GPU is the bottleneck, or the memory bandwidth or whatever else. So while other bottlenecks do exist in the sysyem, adding more cores may not automatically give you better performance for games.

But code to just use arbitrarily more cores is not that hard - Here's a fractal renderer I wrote in python that will just use whatever it finds - https://github.com/starnose/fract/
And it's not even that hard to do things like test what sort of parallelism gives you the best results and tune the number of threads on the fly.

tl;dr - as we get more cores, I think you'll find more and more software will just use whatever it can rather than having a specific number.
 
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Short term - I would guess we are going to see games and programs leveraging up to 16 cores over the next couple of years, if I was building a new PC now with a mid/high budget I would probably go with at least 12 cores and expect it to be good for the next 3 years, knowing I could up it to a 4xxx series Ryzen and top off the cores to 16 if I wanted to later. 8 Cores is going to be the lazy minimum over the next few years with the next gen consoles. ALL the ports from Console to PC are going to leverage the 8 cores in the new consoles... and you have more background crap running on a pc than a console - so a couple of extra cores to run that... and then you are obviously of the PC master race so you are probably wanting to stream... so a couple of cores for that too.

Longer term...
It is super hard to make even a guess at this right now - I guess it depends if people actually start using the PC as a central processing place for smart homes and if we see people start to move away from the ramping reliance on cloud for everything apart from storage or if cloud just becomes how everyone works.

As per earlier in the thread - Linus put a TR build into his house and could run 4 simultaneous gaming rigs off it. That is a bit extreme - but it could become normal to have a central machine running your home, serving data, gaming, streaming and handling security etc. If you can utilise most of a PC for most of the time it is better to own... if you are only very lightly use the power most of the time and occasionally want lots of power then cloud makes more sense. The only caveat is how much we really want to trust the infrastructure for data transmission and what is going to be done to our data at the other end.
 
Basically if we had pc only games like we did years ago,, I guess today we would need all the cpu/gpu power we can get, but thats not the case anymore.
 
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