Quad Core CPU's are slowly becoming like the Dual Core?

[FPS-Russia]

For the first time people now actually recommend i7's with high end graphics card, so does this mean Quad Cores are phasing out? 

There was part truth from AMD fans with FX in that it would do better because more thread count, but obviously IPC is too low for it to make a dramatic difference vs a Quad Core intel.

 

 

[EPPHO]

i7 is Quad core isn't it? Apart from few of them.

[FPS-Russia]

Just now, frozeNNN said:

i7 is Quad core isn't it? Apart from few of them.

8 threads... makes a large difference scaling from 4 cores when you need them.

[EPPHO]

Just now, FPS-Russia said:

8 threads... makes a large difference scaling from 4 cores when you need them.

Still quad core

[FPS-Russia]

Just now, frozeNNN said:

Still quad core

Not going into technicality, it is 8 threads.

[AresKrieger]

7 minutes ago, FPS-Russia said:

i7's with high end graphics card, so does this mean Quad Cores are phasing out? 

Well the i5 are the weakest link in a lot of more intense games, thus causing a bottleneck with high end GPUs so if they are going to spend the money on a high end GPU they might as well get a higher end CPU to balance the computer out

[PCGuy_5960]

Well, the answer is pretty much no... The 4core/4thread CPUs are slowly becoming obsolete for gaming... The 4 core/8thread cpus are still recommended... 

[EPPHO]

3 minutes ago, FPS-Russia said:

Not going into technicality, it is 8 threads.

8 threads doesn't mean 4 cores.

[FPS-Russia]

2 minutes ago, frozeNNN said:

8 threads doesn't mean 4 cores.

 

 

We know... 

 

[EPPHO]

Just now, FPS-Russia said:

Literally no sense what you are saying. Kinda funny and sad

[PCGuy_5960]

2 minutes ago, FPS-Russia said:

8 cores means 8 physical cores, 8 threads means 8 virtual cores... The LGA 115x i7s have 4 physical cores and 8 virtual cores 

[FPS-Russia]

Just now, frozeNNN said:

Literally no sense what you are saying. Kinda funny and sad

I was making fun because you seem to think i have no clue, i like it when i have no clue or am what's the word.. hmmm Russian brain work!

 

....

 

Ahh yes perceived. 

 

i7's are Quad Core designs with HyperThreading so each core manages two work threads. Still 8 threads and are shown as 8 in Windows, unless you go 6-8-10 core.

[EPPHO]

Just now, FPS-Russia said:

I was making fun because you seem to think i have no clue, i like it when i have no clue or am what's the word.. hmmm Russian brain work!

 

....

 

Ahh yes perceived. 

 

i7's are Quad Core designs with HyperThreading so each core manages two work threads. Still 8 threads and are shown as 8 in Windows, unless you go 6-8-10 core.

No comment

[Dash Lambda]

28 minutes ago, FPS-Russia said:

i7's are Quad Core designs with HyperThreading so each core manages two work threads. Still 8 threads and are shown as 8 in Windows, unless you go 6-8-10 core.

The problem here is really rooted in the OP's wording. Consumer i7s are quad-core, so treating i7s and quad-cores as separate things is inherently fallacious.

[david cassar]

Meanwhile I'm running a core 2 duo in 2016 lmaooo

[Bhav]

Look, hyperthreading DOES bridge the gap between having more actual physical cores. It may not be as good as having 8 actual cores, but its still better than 4 cores without HT.

 

Lots of games and software are now finally beginning to make use of HT and more than 4 cores. The HT is a good gambit to cover the requirement for more than 4 'threads'. 

 

In any case, if you want more cores, the 5820k is a bargain for a 6 core Intel chip. I still dont see the reason why I would want to build around a 6700k, when a 5820k and mid range X99 board can be had for only a slight bit more.

[porina]

The number of cores and threads aren't the whole story though... what about clocks? Cache? Other performance limiters elsewhere, especially ram. For example, my laptop has an i7-6700HQ which is 2.6 GHz base. Would you prefer that over a stock i5-6600k at 3.5 GHz base? For a highly threaded use case that responds well to HT, the laptop i7 would be ahead on throughput, but the 6600k would come out ahead otherwise.

 

In my previous testing of HT in various apps, I found that HT buys you up to 50% more over throughput. Quad core with HT would be equivalent in the best case to 6 same clocked cores without HT. Note I'm distilling IPC here, and you may hit other limitations before then. The problem is, getting that 50% is not common. In Cinebench it was around 30% boost from HT. For other software, that boost is effectively zero.

[Bhav]

No you would OC a low clocked I7. Shouldnt be hard at all to get them all to 4 Ghz.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

20 minutes ago, Bhav said:

Look, hyperthreading DOES bridge the gap between having more actual physical cores. It may not be as good as having 8 actual cores, but its still better than 4 cores without HT.

No. I mean, no as in "in general". HT can even make N cores worse than switching it off. This is something that keeps appearing in the forum, maybe I should take teh time to write a dedicated post or something, but HT isn't a way to increase the number of cores, nor to achieve a similar result to increase the number of cores. It is just a way to use the cores you have. The whole "showing up as additional cores in task manager" has done a lot of damage to proper understanding of what HT is.

 

HT will simply let a core accept two tasks at once. Whether is is an advantage at all does not depend on whether programmers "optimize for HT" (?), but whether each of the tasks accepted involves idle times for some parts of the physical core. It's even more effective if the tasks aren't even simultaneous, so they are taken with a small time difference.

However, a program truly exploiting parallel computing, the kind of program that benefits the most from multiple cores, see no boost from HT, as all threads run in synchronicity (and de-synchronizing them harms performance, and it's what HT would cause anyway). In fact, HT can reduce performance to some degree, depending on the communication overhead across threads. On the other hand, HT works at its best with server workloads (managing many small requests) and unrelated multitasking (many programs sending small tasks), because those entail much more idle times to exploit.

 

Bottom line: 4+HT may or may not be better than 4 alone depending on the use case. Most current games hardly ever run parallelized code, and I concede that so far, for gaming, 4+HT is somewhat better than 4. But try switching HT off in an i7 and check how much performance you actually lose (an i5 will have other differences besides HT, like cache - and you can't call anything CPU intensive if cache doesn't matter).

 

34 minutes ago, Bhav said:

Lots of games and software are now finally beginning to make use of HT and more than 4 cores. The HT is a good gambit to cover the requirement for more than 4 'threads'. 

 

To the extent that this is true, this is actually bad news for HT as opposed to physical cores. Think of it this way: the more games become "cinebench-like", the more you depend on physical cores to do the job. The MP to SP ratio for quad cores i7 is typically 4.3-4.5, that is, HT compensates the overhead and adds the equivalent to half a core (an i5 would be in the high 3.X range). An 8-core FX (another task-manager misconception, "modules is just AMD for HT" -just not), will have a ~6.5 MP to SP, meaning that despite all the shared resources, the physical extra hardware will give you the equivalent of 2.5 cores. So not only doesn't HT near-double your cores, it can't even get close to CMT in terms of scaling, which is still less than full extra cores.

 

If "quad cores with a tweak" are still gaming relevant, I'd say quad cores are alive and kicking.

[Bhav]

HT isnt really 'just a tweak'.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

I won't debate faith, mate. Whatever floats your boat!  

[porina]

16 hours ago, Bhav said:

No you would OC a low clocked I7. Shouldnt be hard at all to get them all to 4 Ghz.

If you can do that on my laptop with H170 chipset, I'd be impressed. Not every Skylake i7 is the 6700k.

[ybriK]

lmfao this question...

[Convar]

Well yeah at some point Quad Core CPU's will become less relevant as the 6 and 8 core CPU's become more mainstream and affordable. But you're talking about many years off from now. You don't have anything to worry about for now because whatever your current CPU is right now will last until that time comes easily.

[i_build_nanosuits]

16 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

 It's even more effective if the tasks aren't even simultaneous, so they are taken with a small time difference.

However, a program truly exploiting parallel computing, the kind of program that benefits the most from multiple cores, see no boost from HT, as all threads run in synchronicity (and de-synchronizing them harms performance, and it's what HT would cause anyway). In fact, HT can reduce performance to some degree, depending on the communication overhead across threads. On the other hand, HT works at its best with server workloads (managing many small requests) and unrelated multitasking (many programs sending small tasks), because those entail much more idle times to exploit.

You don't do video rendering or transcoding of video files do you?