cpu Dual Cores in 2017

[alexcheetah]

Do you think dual Cores should still exist in 2017, even with hyperthreading? It seems these days even web browsers are starting to take advantage of multicore CPUs. So do you think in this day and age dual cores are just passed due to be phased out, especially with Ryzen?

 

 

Move this thread if need be.

[redtute]

Dual core will have its place for years to come in light load applications.

Would I buy one?

Only for a home theater PC or a small home server.

[ivan134]

Dual cores still have a place. Arguably single cores still have a place if they existed. You don't need more than one for web browsing, playing music or word processing.

[xentropa]

Dual cores will definitely still exist.

 

Maybe not in PCs but smaller portable elctronics where power consumption and cpu die size really matters and not so much multitasking, will continue to use dual or even single cores.

[alexcheetah]

But even those small electronics like phones tablets and even routers are starting to switch to multicore products, Silicon should be so cheap by now that Dual cores shouldn't be a serious contender in the pc market.

[Sniperfox47]

3 hours ago, alexcheetah said:

But even those small electronics like phones tablets and even routers are starting to switch to multicore products, Silicon should be so cheap by now that Dual cores shouldn't be a serious contender in the pc market.

ARM multiple cores =/= x86 multiple cores

 

A) ARM has better hotplugging to allow disabling cores on the fly when not in use.

 

B) ARM doesn't do dynamic clocking the same way x86 does unless you have custom chips like Qualcomm's and Nvidia's. Therefore BIG.little with hotplugging is the only way to get big power savings and have good performance without much more expensive chips.

 

C) on ARM makes things like SMT and other instruction per clock optimizations are harder, giving Intel (and now AMD) a massive edge on per core performance.

 

D) ARM cores are much cheaper to produce en masse than x86 cores due to their RISC nature.

[TheRandomness]

-Thread moved to CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory.

[rjfaber91]

I'm using a dualcore in my HTPC, where it's perfectly fit for purpose (bearing in mind that system does have a discrete GPU to take care of H264 decoding), so I'd say they've still got a future for such use-cases.