why do we need 6 cores?

doggystyle · 24 Jun 2011 at 21:58

why do we need 6 cores? what advantage does it give us?

thanks.

vanandjuanunited · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:00

Two more cores than four
Six is a higher number
Or
Assume video editing etc would see most benefit otherwise quad more than adequate

as905 · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:03

future proof

i will upgrade to the ivy bridge 8 core but only if my current z68x-ud3p mobo is compatible.

andy_mk3 · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:05

Multitasking

Gtiracer · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:08

In three years time people will be asking

"Why do we need 16 cores?"

More cores is the thing for now until they find a revolutionary new way of creating a processor

Gundog48 · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:09

It's not. Unless you are video encoding regularly, there's no point. I encode regularly and have noticed no discernible difference between my original Phenom x4 and my new 1055T. Fact is, hardly anything can make use of 4 cores, no games can make use of 6. Don't make my mistake and just get a nice i3 or i5, much better choice.

doggystyle · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:17

Gundog48 said:
It's not. Unless you are video encoding regularly, there's no point. I encode regularly and have noticed no discernible difference between my original Phenom x4 and my new 1055T. Fact is, hardly anything can make use of 4 cores, no games can make use of 6. Don't make my mistake and just get a nice i3 or i5, much better choice.

That's what I thought, Some people get seduced by advertising to easily.

ng93 · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:22

It depends what you use the computer for. Some tasks won't (or can't) use more than 1, while others will be sluggish on less than 32 or even 64. For games 4 is the sweet spot atm.

joeyjojo · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:32

My MSci project was a C++ program which we wanted to give literally as much CPU time of as possible. We ended up doing 12-day runs on dual Westmere Xeon X5650 boxes (12 cores). Even they were pretty slow compared to GPUs, if only we had time to port it to CUDA.

nuttyprot · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:36

People asked the same question when 4 cores first came out. Now more and more things use the cores it has become standard. Same thing will happen with 6 cores+.

Jordan97 · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:38

doggystyle said:
why do we need 6 cores?

I do not know. Why do we need 6 cores?

scrlk · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:40

Last year there was a rumour going around that Bulldozer could 'thread fuse' (use two cores for a single threaded application). Sadly that now looks like it's made up but a man can dream.

DarkMatter · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:40

For my research in Computational Fluid dynamics you take as many cores as possible....4,8,16,32..... Just means i can get more data.

joeyjojo · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:43

DarkMatter said:
For my research in Computational Fluid dynamics you take as many cores as possible....4,8,16,32..... Just means i can get more data.

As above, if it's parallelisable, port it to CUDA for order of magnitude speed increases (so I've heard).

Hagar · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:43

It will be down to how software is coded. Games use up to 4 cores because that is how they are written. It is progressive just like moores transistor law. As cpu's become smaller and die shrunk it is a lot easier to add cores rather than ramp up clocks to increase the work done. It is also more energy efficient. So when the software catches up with hardware the 6, 8, 12, 16 cores etc. will be used.

Phenomenologica · 24 Jun 2011 at 22:43

Anything calculation heavy, for example working with videos, simulations as with Darkmatter's post, photo-realistic rendering, that kind of thing. More cores = more processing power = less time taken.

simbady · 24 Jun 2011 at 23:12

Gundog48 said:
It's not. Unless you are video encoding regularly, there's no point. I encode regularly and have noticed no discernible difference between my original Phenom x4 and my new 1055T. Fact is, hardly anything can make use of 4 cores, no games can make use of 6. Don't make my mistake and just get a nice i3 or i5, much better choice.

Crysis 2 can already make use of 8 cores

Zuban · 24 Jun 2011 at 23:16

i use as many cores as i can get for 3d rendering, which for as long as i can remember has made use of as many threads as your system can handle.

Final8y · 24 Jun 2011 at 23:20

Gundog48 said:
It's not. Unless you are video encoding regularly, there's no point. I encode regularly and have noticed no discernible difference between my original Phenom x4 and my new 1055T. Fact is, hardly anything can make use of 4 cores, no games can make use of 6. Don't make my mistake and just get a nice i3 or i5, much better choice.

You don't play BFBC2 or Dirt 3 = 6 cores scaling.
http://www.techspot.com/review/403-dirt-3-performance/page7.html

You don't play or did not know that most games that are based on the UT3 engine will use 4 cores

You don't play or did not know that most games that are based on the Capcom MT Framework engine will use 4 cores

You don't play or did not know that most games that are based on the later source engine will use 4 cores like L4D TF2 ect...

You don't play or did not know that most games RTS will use 4 cores.

I could go on.

I do allot of multi tasking & the difference is night & day.

MouthBoy · 24 Jun 2011 at 23:30

For many people, they will not see the difference (yet) but for people like myself who do a lot of rendering I want as much processing power as I can afford really. When I am rendering out in Maya I have maxed out all 4 cores and 12gb of RAM, and I do not consider that as pushing the application really.