When do you really benefit from more than 6 cores in real-world scenarios?

[NewbieOverclocker]

I understand it is a relatively common question, and I have seen lots of benchmarks and tests etc on this, but I still struggle to understand:

when do you benefit from more than 6 cores? When does it make sense to have 8 or 12 cores, instead of 6?

For example, thinking of the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 (6 cores) vs the 7 7700 (8) vs the 9 7900 (12), in what real-life scenarios is there a real benefit in having more than 6 cores?
There are loads of benchmarks, eg https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-5-7600-cpu-review , but it's never clear to me how much those benchmark numbers translate into tangible real-world differences

Aside from certain tasks which lend themselves very well to parallelisation, like encoding hundreds of video files, does having more core make sense only if you are constantly carrying out multiple tasks at the same time, eg you have 10 programs open at the same time and all running doing something?

To what extent is getting 12 cores about future-proofing your system, as in, there isn't a lot of software right now which makes the most of 12 cores, but there may be in the near future, so a 12-core system is more future proof than an 8-core one?

I imagine that, in many scenarios, the money you save buying fewer cores would be better spent buying more/faster ram, a faster SSD, etc, but, just in theory, if you already have the best other parts, when would you really benefit from more than 6 cores?

Thanks!

 

[NewbieOverclocker]

This is slightly off-topic, but:

On Excel: TBH if you are getting to the point where you need so many cores in Excel, it means you shouldn't be using Excel but something else.
Excel is great for quick, one-off calculations but scales very poorly.
The more your task is complex, business-critical and/or needs to be run periodically, the more you shouldn't be using Excel.

Also, Excel is not "transparent" at all. For the same level of complexity, a well-written piece of code will be much more transparent and easier to read and audit than a well-put together spreadsheet.
A nested if with 6 conditions is easy to read and understand in any coding language. 6 nested IFs in Excel are a nightmare.
if this > that then take green else take white is easy to understand; if(c4>m6,sheet2!l20,sheet4!m17) is much harder to audit and more error prone: what is m6? should it have been n5? etc etc

Just think that things live version control and unit tests are impossible to do properly in Excel and VBA; the mere fact that most spreadsheet people don't even know what those concepts mean says it all, really.

Look up what happened with the London whale scandal at JP Morgan. Part of the problem was a calculation error in Excel. Sure, the world is full of code with worse errors, but with code there is a well established framework to test for and catch these errors - not so with spreadsheets.

 

[NewbieOverclocker]

To be honest you can get away with four cores if all you do is just surf and watch movies and play the odd games. I have a 1065G7 Surface Pro with 16GB and it's just fine for this.

But having a 24 core rig for 4 years now changes your workflow. You can do everything all at once, no longer one project at a time. Only challenge is removing bottlenecks to ensure everything is utilised. I had 64gb Ram for a long time holding up the GPU and CPU usage. With 128Gb it runs much better. If you compile code, encode or upscale videos, render, run VMs, then the more cores you have the more time you save.

But if you're just a gamer, 8 cores will sort you for a while and trying to future proof with more cores hasn't been too worthwhile, considering the single core speed has increased a fair bit since Zen 1 and the 8700k days albeit by using more power to support higher clocks..

OK, so, for someone who doesn't use specialised software optimised for loads of cores and only plays the occasional game, I guess 6 cores would be enough?

When people say more cores let you do more stuff at the same time, what exactly does that mean? If we exclude CPU-intensive tasks like video encoding, does having multiple windows of things like Teams chat, Zoom video call, some Office software, a few browser tabs etc open benefit from more than 6 cores?

 

[NewbieOverclocker]

My current system is a 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 1600X with 16 GBs of RAM, bought 6 years ago

 

[NewbieOverclocker]

Whilst i completely agree, anybody building spreadsheets of any kind of importance without properly naming sheets, using tables and named ranges should be shot. It's not hard to make them much more readable than that.

Sure, but:

• the apparent ease of use of spreadsheets is part of the problem. Anyone with opposable thumbs can put together a spreadsheet, without any training, and spreadsheets as a tool do not encourage sensible development / structuring in any way
• a competent spreadsheet user can improve some aspects, like the poor naming, but not all: a nested if with 6 conditions will still be a nightmare. Testing and version control remain practically impossible. I have seen teams which moved from Excel to Python and there was no comparison