Cores vz Megahertz

[tridy]

Maybe it is just me, bu recently I mostly look at the number of cores rather than the frequency. How do you guys make sense when you compare CPUs with similar frequencies but double the amount of cores? How do you compare tasks to cores and frequencies?

 

Some reviewers say, "We need to wait until the developers start optimizing games for multi-core CPUs". My question is "why would they?" if it is currently the graphics card that bottlenecks and not the CPU. CPUs are doing fine in this area, I think.

 

So, what kind of enthusiasts are we talking about when getting into TR and i9 area? If we leave out 4k encoding of videos, and playing + streaming at the same time, who are those enthusiasts that are left? What would they be doing to utilize the power? Sure, building the system and running synthetic benchmark is sooooo useful to get a like, but what is the real life use of this power hungry heating system? Just because you can and it makes you feel better?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Cores and clockspeed mean nothing without knowing the IPC. If you just look at cores and clock speeds, the FX8350 is better than something like an i7 6700K

[cj09beira]

Just now, tridy said:

Maybe it is just me, bu recently I mostly look at the number of cores rather than the frequency. How do you guys make sense when you compare CPUs with similar frequencies but double the amount of cores? How do you compare tasks to cores and frequencies?

 

Some reviewers say, "We need to wait until the developers start optimizing games for multi-core CPUs". My question is "why would they?" if it is currently the graphics card that bottlenecks and not the CPU. CPUs are doing fine in this area, I think.

 

So, what kind of enthusiasts are we talking about when getting into TR and i9 area? If we leave out 4k encoding of videos, and playing + streaming at the same time, who are those enthusiasts that are left? What would they be doing to utilize the power? Sure, building the system and running synthetic benchmark is sooooo useful to get a like, but what is the real life use of this power hungry heating system? Just because you can and it makes you feel better?

cpus are only doing fine because we have been stuck with 4 core cpus for so long, i bet in 4 years you will be seeing games using a lot more cpu power, to allow for bigger maps, more npcs, fancier phisics etc,

i9s and threadripper is for people that have hobbies/work with things like compiling big programs, run virtual machines, doing various types of simulations things like that,

[Protex]

When working with demanding tasks such as almost all types of video editing, photo editing and other graphical / simulatory work / 3D modelling, greater core counts can vastly improve the workflow speed, however games would generally not be affected greatly by core count, however calls for developers to optimize for higher core counts has been sparked by the Ryzen CPUs featuring higher core counts than their Intel counterparts.  

[themctipers]

It depends on what the PC is for 

 

gaming only? MHz wins over cores, provided that there are at least 4 physical cores. 

 

Anything that is multithreaded? Cores wins over MHz

 

a mix of both? Cores over MHz because you'll gain a boost in productivity but you'll only lose a couple of FPS when gaming high refresh rate 1080p (talking RYZEN against 7700k)

 

but, you need to know the IPC before you start thinking of the cores and MHz.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The general sentiment for games is developers can optimize or develop with more cores in mind. I find that a naive approach because not everything will benefit from it. Something like Ashes of the Singularity benefits from it because there are hundreds upon hundreds of entities that need to be handled at once. Civilization games can use it to crunch CPU turns. But something like DOOM or PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has no strong use case for needing to have as many cores as possible. And even if it could be optimized for as many cores as possible (after all, DOOM runs on an 8-core console), the work being done may be so simple that in the same time slice it takes a slower 8-core processor to do the work, a much faster 4-core processor can do it.

 

Multithreading isn't some magical unicorn that will save the day. It's hard to get right and even if the problem is embarrassingly parallel, you can ask the GPU to do it since it'll do it much faster than the CPU.

 

13 minutes ago, tridy said:

Just because you can and it makes you feel better?

Yeah, pretty much.

[maartendc]

13 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The general sentiment for games is developers can optimize or develop with more cores in mind. I find that a naive approach because not everything will benefit from it. Something like Ashes of the Singularity benefits from it because there are hundreds upon hundreds of entities that need to be handled at once. Civilization games can use it to crunch CPU turns. But something like DOOM or PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has no strong use case for needing to have as many cores as possible. And even if it could be optimized for as many cores as possible (after all, DOOM runs on an 8-core console), the work being done may be so simple that in the same time slice it takes a slower 8-core processor to do the work, a much faster 4-core processor can do it.

 

Multithreading isn't some magical unicorn that will save the day. It's hard to get right and even if the problem is embarrassingly parallel, you can ask the GPU to do it since it'll do it much faster than the CPU.

 

Yeah, pretty much.

Yes, this is very true. I read a very interesting article recently on Ars Technica  going into this very topic. Some tasks can be optimized for multiple cores, but some tasks just don't lend themselves to it very well. It depends on the type of game engine, and the game engine needs to be built from the ground up to divide the calculations between multiple cores.

 

Read it here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/intel-still-beats-ryzen-at-games-but-how-much-does-it-matter/

 

Only when the vast majority of gamers has a 8-core processor, only then will developers actually take the time to code for optimizing their game engines towards that. It is possible, but when only 10% of gamers has a 8-core CPU, you don't want to spend your development time on doing that. It just does not make business sense at that point. I think it will take another 5 years before we really see the majority of gamers have 8-core CPU's (quadcores will be the most mainstream market segment for the next couple of years, because up until recently that was all that was available). 

 

24 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Cores and clockspeed mean nothing without knowing the IPC. If you just look at cores and clock speeds, the FX8350 is better than something like an i7 6700K

Very true. You just need to look at benchmarks and cost really. I use cpu.userbenchmark.com a lot, just to get a rough idea of performance. If you know a more specific Use-case for the CPU, look up benchmarks for particular software or games, and compare the two processors.

 

Within the same architecture, lets say Skylake i3 vs Skylake i5 processors, yes, more clockspeed and more cores means more power. But you cannot compare say a Ryzen 5 with a Core i5 just looking at clockspeeds or number of cores anymore. You need to look at benchmarks.

[DaftBehemoth]

First step, know what load you're going to be putting on the CPU. If you're gaming, 4 cores is enough (maybe 8 if you want to go a little overkill). If you're doing any production stuff like rendering, get as many cores as you can.

 

Step two, completely ignore clock speed. The only case where clock speed matters is if you're comparing identical platforms. Such as a Sandybridge CPU to another Sandybridge CPU. As others have said, it's instructions per clock (IPC) that matter, not the actual clock itself. 

 

Step three, look at benchmarks. Do not speculate performance based on core count and clock speed. Look at actual performance.

[tridy]

Thanks! Got a bit more understanding.

 

Is there any scenario (besides gaming?) where single-core performance would be prioritized over multi-core performance?

[MyName13]

1 minute ago, tridy said:

Thanks! Got a bit more understanding.

 

Is there any scenario (besides gaming?) where single-core performance would be prioritized over multi-core performance?

Pretty much everything that can't be paralellized, when it comes to gaming forget about "multi core optimisation" because such thing doesn't exist, something might be achieved through dx 12 but that is only for draw calls, not game logic.Developers won't paralellize because consoles have very weak cores and even if they do modern desktop CPUs are so much more powerful that they can do it without parallelization.

[Jonathan Lemmens]

4 hours ago, tridy said:

Maybe it is just me, bu recently I mostly look at the number of cores rather than the frequency. How do you guys make sense when you compare CPUs with similar frequencies but double the amount of cores? How do you compare tasks to cores and frequencies?

You have to compare them trough benchmarks, there is no other way.

 

4 hours ago, tridy said:

Some reviewers say, "We need to wait until the developers start optimizing games for multi-core CPUs". My question is "why would they?" if it is currently the graphics card that bottlenecks and not the CPU. CPUs are doing fine in this area, I think.

The reviewers are right, but as you and many others who replied here suggested, they probably won't until the majority of gamers are using more than 4 cores. On the other hand, not every game is limited by GPU performance (think about indie games or sims like cities skylines), those developers, if they can, will generally try to optimise their games to use more cores.

 

4 hours ago, tridy said:

So, what kind of enthusiasts are we talking about when getting into TR and i9 area? If we leave out 4k encoding of videos, and playing + streaming at the same time, who are those enthusiasts that are left? What would they be doing to utilize the power? Sure, building the system and running synthetic benchmark is sooooo useful to get a like, but what is the real life use of this power hungry heating system? Just because you can and it makes you feel better?

The people doing video encoding and gamestreaming are actually a large portion of the 'enthusiast' public. The other guys are probably people who are benchmarking a lot as a hobby or even sport. And some people who have the money just think its awesome to have an 16c/32t PC even though they would never use that power all at a time. Also I think businesses will use a lot of TR and X299.

 

I would also consider someone an enthusiast who buys PC hardware which he or she doesn't actually need but just because it cool to have. For example, I bought quite few used 771 Xeons and tested and OC'd them in order to do my own "binning". Now i'm €150 lighter and 12 Xeons heavier for which I have no direct use, but I had a great time benching them  

[cj09beira]

5 hours ago, MyName13 said:

Pretty much everything that can't be paralellized, when it comes to gaming forget about "multi core optimisation" because such thing doesn't exist, something might be achieved through dx 12 but that is only for draw calls, not game logic.Developers won't paralellize because consoles have very weak cores and even if they do modern desktop CPUs are so much more powerful that they can do it without parallelization.

thats exactly the opposite of what they do, as both consoles are 8 core machines. not all games are gimped because of console limitations, and now that this large amounts of cores are cheap and available devs will find interesting ways of using them 

[MyName13]

8 hours ago, cj09beira said:

thats exactly the opposite of what they do, as both consoles are 8 core machines. not all games are gimped because of console limitations, and now that this large amounts of cores are cheap and available devs will find interesting ways of using them 

Consoles have very weak CPUs and fake octa cores, those are 4c8t CPUs (like bulldozer, 4 modules).This large amount of cores isn't "cheap", r5 1600 costs half as much as a console, they can't require powerful hexa cores on PC and yet make it work on weak quad core jaguars on consoles.