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

[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

 

[james.miller]

spreadsheets as a tool do not encourage sensible development / structuring in any way

Well, named ranges also improve the readability of deep nested if conditions but they can also be rewritten any number of ways to improve readability, speed or even both. However, that's a discipline that's not really taught by any tool or language. Python can be a complete mess as well if somebody wants it to be

 

[Quartz]

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.

This is not actually true. Excel is a hugely powerful tool.

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.

Transparency depends upon the writer, not the application. Are you forgetting that many more people can read Excel spreadsheets than read code? Reading code is a hurdle. Hurdles are bad. Also, Excel is less intimidating for the client - it's 'only' a spreadsheet.

 

[RBImGuy]

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!

Gaming 6 cores is fine for years to come.
usually specific workloads outside gaming benefits from more cores.Unless you do such, 6 cores is plenty as games usually load one or 2 cores normally and 4 is the sweetspot currently meaning 6 is plenty

 

[Zarax]

This is not actually true. Excel is a hugely powerful tool.



Transparency depends upon the writer, not the application. Are you forgetting that many more people can read Excel spreadsheets than read code? Reading code is a hurdle. Hurdles are bad. Also, Excel is less intimidating for the client - it's 'only' a spreadsheet.

Excel can be greatly expanded via PowerBI but there are alternatives designed for the average Excel user that can speed up the process a lot.
Advanced analytics can make immense improvements, it's actually part of my job to pick Excel files like the one you mentioned and make them into something more automated and easier to maintain.

 

[sityeuropa]

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?

Thanks!

Multiple cores can be used on the same Task, like encoding just one video file. or one coding project. Splits the single task into multiple parts for each core to take on.

 

[jigger]

Gaming 6 cores is fine for years to come.
usually specific workloads outside gaming benefits from more cores.Unless you do such, 6 cores is plenty as games usually load one or 2 cores normally and 4 is the sweetspot currently meaning 6 is plenty

With very old games that might be the case, anything reasonably modern scales pretty well with cores. Nvidia GPU’s/API palm off a lot of extra work to the CPU cores also.

 

[=XDC=FluphyBunny]

Noticed in various games benchmarks six core CPUs seem to have lower 1% averages. Same thing with even the 13600 and it’s p cores.

 

[Wing-Man]

in games zero.... i went 5600x to 5800x and got nothing

 

[RBImGuy]

With very old games that might be the case, anything reasonably modern scales pretty well with cores. Nvidia GPU’s/API palm off a lot of extra work to the CPU cores also.

No they dont.
Nvidia has cpu overhead with drivers.
4 cores is the medium range below that there is a trade off, 6 cores is fine and will be fine even for years to come.
games are made to fit low end hardware.
If devs made a game that even on the lowest ould require a 16 core cpu and a card that cost 1500 or such, they be out of business.

had 6 cores for years recently upgraded to 8 and x3d tech and the cache makes the difference not 2 cores more.

 

[jigger]

No they dont.
Nvidia has cpu overhead with drivers.
4 cores is the medium range below that there is a trade off, 6 cores is fine and will be fine even for years to come.
games are made to fit low end hardware.
If devs made a game that even on the lowest ould require a 16 core cpu and a card that cost 1500 or such, they be out of business.

had 6 cores for years recently upgraded to 8 and x3d tech and the cache makes the difference not 2 cores more.

Nvidia definitely do. Enable and disable Nvidia features and look at the load on the CPU.

 

[stooeh]

I'm sure we will soon see some comparisons of the 5600X3D vs 5800X3D - I expect there will be the odd game that benefits from the extra cores. Maybe Spider-Man/Cyberpunk/Warzone 2?

 

[mid_gen]

In general, AAA games are migrating to patterns that better utilise more cores (usually ECS of some kind)...although there is a limit to what just a data processing framework will give you, and it varies massively between studios and engines.

Still on the fence about my upgrade from my 5820k. On the one hand, the 7800X3D is a pretty neat chip, but I'm only getting two more cores over a CPU that is 8 years old I think I'll probably end up with a 7900 non-X as 12 cores seems like a much more solid, long term upgrade, and I do more game dev than gaming on my PC these days.

 

[Tee Hee Johnson]

Normal things like 7zip love more cores

 

[HangTime]

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?

Yes 6 cores is enough. In gaming the only places I've really benefited from 12 cores is Assassins Creed Unity and Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator.

Having multiple (basic non intensive) apps open on the desktop doesn't need more than 6 cores either. Quad core is fine for basic office tasks. Whilst I wouldn't recommend it, even a dual core can suffice (my son uses my old ultrabook with i7-4500u 2c4t and its fine for playing youtube whilst using Teams, I've done video calls on it etc).

 

[Xelene]

Modern consoles have 8c CPUs, so you'll indirectly benefit from games designed for them being multicore friendly; desktop CPUs are typically a lot faster so 6c can brute force workloads better. When i'm not doing actual productivity, I enjoy having spare cores and plenty of RAM so that I can leave half a dozen apps open in the background and not worry about it.

 

[Yaayuh!]

You might choose a CPU with more cores due to the general higher performance (cache and clock speed of the CPUs available).

 

[OspreyO]

Tasks I do where many cores help

Video Encoding, Editing.
Multitasking large applications. I can encoded and the machine is still responsive for other tasks.
Same with running a game while being able to switch to other tasks.

 

[OspreyO]

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

If you are a developer you can write efficient code in VBA. You can also split up large workbooks (or access databases) into smaller files and run them concurrently, then combine them afterwards. I once got a Excel/Access process down from 2 weeks to 24 hours doing this. Though I could probably got it down to an hour in SQL.

Problem is most power users aren't developers. Most people don't think out of the box and parallel processing tasks.

VBA is still handy for automation. Currently run a regular job that took the previous owner of the task 3 hour, much of it manual. I have it down to 10 mins fully automated. I get a cuppa come back and its done. I'll move it to PowerBI or such eventually. Our place still does a lot of stuff in Excel. Even though we have much better options.

 

[Zarax]

If you are a developer you can write efficient code in VBA. You can also split up large workbooks (or access databases) into smaller files and run them concurrently, then combine them afterwards. I once got a Excel/Access process down from 2 weeks to 24 hours doing this. Though I could probably got it down to an hour in SQL.

Problem is most power users aren't developers. Most people don't think out of the box and parallel processing tasks.

VBA is still handy for automation. Currently run a regular job that took the previous owner of the task 3 hour, much of it manual. I have it down to 10 mins fully automated. I get a cuppa come back and its done. I'll move it to PowerBI or such eventually. Our place still does a lot of stuff in Excel. Even though we have much better options.

I moved from Excel + Access to Alteryx + Tableau and man, it was like a 10X improvement as well as enabling use cases that previously required external consultants. Modern advanced analytics tools enable miracles in productivity and automation!