6 or 8 cores in FM2+ socket?.

[Tom is a Door]

One of the most recent FM2+ APU has 12 logical cores, but having 4 (CPU) logical cores seems to repeat over the years, so I was wondering if quad core was the cap for the fm2+, also what is your expectation and future of quad core how long will it be relevant and or kicking butts?

[TheSLSAMG]

It's unlikely that it will happen at this point. The Axx-8xxx(K) series are going to top out at 4 cores according to recent leaks.

[D3MON]

quad cores will be around for a while, not because there's no need for more (there certainly is) but gaming doesnt really bother the cpu much thats why graphics cards are a much bigger part of a budget.

more cores/threads allow you to do more things at once otherwise no-one would buy a 5960x and we'd all have i5-4430's.
while that might game well doing any other actual work will be a fraction of the performance of a higher end cpu, thats why they exist.

from what i can gather all the old games from years ago and indie titles the die hard basement dwellers love are single core bound in which case cores are irrelevant.
mainstream titles however can usually use as many cores as you have, most people only say 4 because they have no way to test otherwise. i have plenty of screeenshots showing only 4 threads being used (and lots of more) but id rather have half my cpu spare to do other things than have it pinned at 90% and go round proclaiming "games only use 4 cores" to make myself feel better.

in the next few years i see AMD doing a quad core hyperthreaded style apu with even more powerful graphics (think hd7770) for use with HSA and other major technologies (very promising and much underrated), intel meanwhile will get another 5%ipc boost alongside a minor TDP reduction of a few watts but will once again overclock less probably maxing out around 4.2ghz.
shorter pipelines are great for IPC but rubbish for overclocking, but increased ipc means you can get reduced power by reducing clock speeds, and maintaining performance, it all fits together. thats why sandybridge hit or exceeded 5ghz, ivybridge around 4.8ghz and haswell around 4.6ghz for a given cpu style.

[harrynowl]

Well they're Quad Cores because of die size restraints, they need as much space for the GPU portion of the silicone as they can get.

[Sauron]

Wait, when did a 12 core APU release? I thought that was just rumour.

[Unhelpful]

Wait, when did a 12 core APU release? I thought that was just rumour.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113359

 

12 compute cores

[Sauron]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113359

 

12 compute cores

 

OOOOOOOOOOOH

 

I never really got the point of classifying gpus in terms of "compute cores"... what does it even mean to have "multi-core graphics"?

[Unhelpful]

OOOOOOOOOOOH

 

I never really got the point of classifying gpus in terms of "compute cores"... what does it even mean to have "multi-core graphics"?

Advertising.

[harrynowl]

OOOOOOOOOOOH

 

I never really got the point of classifying gpus in terms of "compute cores"... what does it even mean to have "multi-core graphics"?

Well I think they define a core as a set of logic, so a GCN compute unit is comprised of 64 ALUs, and then each of those ALUs shares the front end fetch/decode etc