Cores, Threads

[Alix]

Hi looking at a new laptop does having more threads mean better performance or having more cores.

 

Seen a laptop with 2 core and 4 threads does this me it can handle to task at once just confused does core and threads need to be symmetrical. 

 

Thanks for any replies.

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Alix said:

Hi looking at a new laptop does having more threads mean better performance or having more cores.

 

Seen a laptop with 2 core and 4 threads does this me it can handle to task at once just confused does core and threads need to be symmetrical. 

 

Thanks for any replies.

Any laptop with only 2 cores is either from 2006 or is the worst garbage imaginable.

 

Just tell us your budget and what you need to do rather than us just explaining an easily Google able Wikipedia article on how muticore cpus work.

[Alix]

200-250 pounds for a laptop need it for light video editing and general use.

[PowerPCFan]

1 hour ago, emosun said:

Any laptop with only 2 cores is either from 2006 or is the worst garbage imaginable.

5 of the 11th gen i3 chips have only 2 cores**. It's not that bad. 

Of course, try to look for a 4-core laptop, it will usually be much better. Usually, cores don't matter, but the jump from 2 to 4 is pretty big!

 

@Alix Try to look for laptops that have these chips, they have 4 cores or more:

Intel Core i5 11th gen - 4 cores

Intel Core i3 12th gen - 4 cores

Intel Core i3 13th gen - 4 cores

Intel Core i5 12th gen - 10 cores

Intel Core i5 13th gen - 14 cores

Almost any AMD Ryzen CPU (Even the very first Ryzen 3 1200 has 4 cores, so I'd assume that any laptop with an AMD Ryzen CPU has 4 or more cores.)

 

**Source: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/202987/11th-generation-intel-core-i3-processors.html

[whispous]

2 hours ago, Alix said:

200-250 pounds for a laptop need it for light video editing and general use.

Can you define what "light" video editing is?

 

Because I would probably smash the room up if I had to use Microsoft Word on a £250 laptop, let alone any form of video editing.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Alix

 

You need some information about processors. You can watch videos, but I will take some effort to explain in short.

 

Cores are like individual workers in a processor. The more of them you have, the powerful your processor is. Threads on the other hand (not to be confused with software level threads which you might see in task manager; we are talking about CPU threads), is the line of data that is being passed to a CPU core for processing.

 

Sometimes you might see the amount of threads to be the same as the amount of cores. In which case, in your processor, every single core can/is able to process a single thread at a time. But more commonly nowadays, you might see the number of threads to be more, commonly double (not on Intel 12th gen and later, which we will talk about later) the number of cores. In this configuration, every of your CPU core is capable of handling 2 physical threads at the same time. This feature is called as "Hyper Threading" by Intel and "Simultaneous Multithreading" by AMD.

 

Having hardware CPU multithreading is better, because well, your processor can now process double the threads at the same time. One thing to note however, is that assigning 2 threads to a single core doesn't mean double the multithreaded performance. To understand this, you will need to know why we even have CPU multithreading.

 

We have this feature because say if one CPU thread is waiting for something, say for retrieving data from the memory or maybe if that CPU thread is not very active, our CPU core is underutilized, which means we can run another separate CPU thread on the same core to utilize it better. There is also stuff like modern cores are really complex and powerful that they might not get fully saturated with only 1 thread, and so, 2 threads on a single core is better.

 

However, if one of your CPU thread is fully saturated (meaning its busy), then there leaves very little room for completely saturating another whole CPU thread on that same core. But there is still technically room for running another thread and so, using CPU multithreading, you will always get better multithreaded performance, but just not double. It's also that disabling CPU multithreading can give a boost to single threaded performance because you are giving maximum CPU concentration on that single thread, but the performance boost is very low and not worth it rater than getting a big jump in multithreaded performance.

 

This thread thing has become a bit more complicated when Intel introduced their hybrid core architecture in 12th gen. Now you have 2 types of cores, a performance 'P' core, and and efficient 'E' core. The P cores do support Intel Hyper Threading technology, but the 'E' cores do not. So this configuration can result in a confusing number such as the 14900K having 24 cores and 32 threads. If you look closely, the 24 cores are split-up in 8 P cores and 16 E cores. So the amount of threads are 8x2 + 16x1 = 32. Also note that the E cores are quite a bit slower than the P cores, making the 24 cores in the 14900k misleading, as only 8 of them are proper high performance cores, which compared the AMD Ryzen 7950X, which has 16 C / 32 T, but all of them are full performance cores. But at the end, the Intel flagship comes a bit faster than than AMD one, because in single threaded benchmarks, the Intel P core is faster, and for multi-threaded benchmarks, Intel got more E cores which is better than having less P cores with hyperthreading.

 

One mistake beginners do is to shop for a CPU with the highest amount of cores and also the highest amount of clock speed. More cores and clock speed is better, but that is more important is the CPU generation. Newer generations have better CPU micro-architecture, which means, newer processors can overthrow old processors who have more cores and higher clock speed. For example, an i3-12100F is faster than a 9 year old i7-4790K despite the i7 having more cores and higher clock speed. But that doesn't mean you should go for the latest gen always. Differences of just a few generations but a different tier don't matter, or even better. For example, the 13700K is almost the same as a 12900K.

 

But one thing to note that you can almost never have more cores and more clock speed at the same time, which is also the reason you can't keep adding more cores to a processor. This is because more cores will obviously raise the price, but if we get scientific here, more cores will add more heat, making it harder for the processor to cool down, which also affects how high its clock speed can turbo.

 

Also, it looks like you are confused in what does a core actually do. 2 cores doesn't directly mean it can run 2 programs at once. Simply, it does, technically, it does not. If I only have 4 cores, then that doesn't mean I can only operate 4 programs at once, can I? No, your OS handles the fast switching between program execution, which means that your cores are switching between programs every few nanoseconds or so, which is so fast it gives you the illusion that everything is happening simultaneously. 2 cores doesn't mean you can run 2 programs simultaneously. One of that program itself can have hundreds of its own software threads. Just take a look in Task manager in the CPU section in performance tab.

 

 Now actually coming back to your question, the budget you mentioned is quite low. You can get laptops, but they will mostly have Intel Celeron or Pentium processors, which are the lowest tier Intel processors. But yes, they will do light video editing, and normal work, just ok. You might get a second hand one which might be older but at least haven an i5 in it. If so, just make sure to not go older than Intel 8th gen.

[Alix]

@whispous I use my laptop for editing family vacations, concerts videos using a video editing software, YouTube, browsing just generally basic stuff nothing really heavy use. My original laptop CPU is a 10 year celeron dual core 2 threads. Thanks for replying

Edited February 19 by Alix

[Alix]

@Gat Pelsinger Thanks

[Alix]

@PowerPCFan Thanks

[Alix]

@Gat Pelsinger Will look at the i5 but definitely will look at the generation.

My original laptop CPU is a 10 year celeron dual core 2 threads so i5 will be a step up