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Quad core vs. Dual Core

I

Ironsoap

n00b
Joined
Apr 12, 2007
Messages
30
Okay, so I've been hearing people tell me the future of quad core is bleak, and that it's not worth it to buy a quad core, saying that doing so is just going to leave 2 cores idle more often than not. How true is this? What is the future for quad core computing?
 
Actually, the future of quad core is quite the opposite. As software developers design their software around quad, or any multi-core processor, applications will be able to run smoother and better all around and it will allow developers to incorporate more things into the applications. I'm not sure who told you it was a "bleak" future, but they sound to me like a bunch of retards who shouldn't be giving out advice.

Unless they were talking about today's software. There is limited support in software for people with multi-core processors at the moment. But that area will open up vastly in the near future.

-Seegs
 
The immediate future depends on the software you use and what you use your machine for. Would I personally have a pressing use for a quad core if it wasn't for Folding@Home? Nope. My current software use outside of that does not have much of a need for quad core. That said, I just finished a quad core system and have the CPU for my second coming later this week.

A little farther into the future? I would say quad core will be a necessity and more than a convenience depending on your software. Just remember, not that long ago people were bitching left and right that dual core was useless for everyone except for a select few. That's definitely not the case now. While the difference between single and dual is a lot more than dual to quad, the same still holds true.

Simple answer to this. If buying a quad isn't going to hurt your pocketbook or cause you to lower the specs on your system elsewhere then I see no reason not to get one. Things are a bit smoother now that I have a quad although the 4 gig of RAM is part of that. However, I did have the 4 gig of RAM in my C2D system for a few days and it didn't feel as responsive as my C2Q.

 
and another topic :D

my openion, QUAD QUAD QUAD

though this says that dual is more popular, it tells that quad is on the way to take the lead
:)
35898540dh4.jpg
 
Ironsoap said:
Okay, so I've been hearing people tell me the future of quad core is bleak, and that it's not worth it to buy a quad core
Click to expand...

Just give us names & addresses. We'll handle it from here. :D

Right now quad cores aren't being properly utilized but that will definately change soon.
 
Ironsoap said:
Okay, so I've been hearing people tell me the future of quad core is bleak, and that it's not worth it to buy a quad core, saying that doing so is just going to leave 2 cores idle more often than not. How true is this? What is the future for quad core computing?
Click to expand...

This is true. Unless you have software that will utilize quad-core, they will sit idle. That being said, who cares? :D

What the quad-core zealots failed to mention is this though. For most single tasking software today, a dual-core is faster than a quad-core for the same price. However, if you're willing to pay more for the quad to overcompensate that it usually has a slower clock speed than it's comparable dual-core, you won't notice a difference. (Something that uses one or two cores at 3.0Ghz will of course be faster than something that uses the same amount of cores at 2.4Ghz - with two sitting idle.)

I know everybody comes to [H] for advice, so do I, but this is one scenario where it's best just to decide for yourself based on what you do. For instance, I don't game at all. I only have one application that really uses quad-core, and that's x264 encoding. Is it worth it to spend the extra $$ for that one app? Probably not... but sometimes you just want to buy what you want, not need! ;)

-Robert
 
Valnar said:
This is true. Unless you have software that will utilize quad-core, they will sit idle. That being said, who cares? :D
Click to expand...

What is true? It's certainly not true that the future for Quad core is bleak. The future is quad, and multiprocessing systems in general. If quad core's future was bleak why would they release an 8-core at nehalem? Also, even when programs don't take full use of four cores, my quad has been pretty good about distributing load among all four cores. The usage between the cores is almost always within ~10% of each other. On the flip side, I have more computing power than really need 97% of the time. But for me, that's a good thing because I don't want to buy another computer anytime soon.
 
aethelwulf said:
What is true?
Click to expand...

It's true that you are "going to leave 2 cores idle more often than not", at the moment.

I went for a quad myself. I intend to keep this computer for 3-4 years without upgrading the motherboard/CPU/RAM, and I imagine that quad-cores will be in a better position in the future. It's inevitable that developers will increase multi-threading; maybe 8 cores will be hard to program for, but I'm sure that 3/4 will be feasible, and developers aren't going to want to leave most of the power of these chips idle. Dual cores might have higher clock speeds, but they're not stratospherically so, and it's going to be easier to cope with a CPU that has a slightly lower clock speed than one which lacks whole cores, if parallelisation increases. Of course quad cores aren't "future proof", but it's quite likely that they'll age more gracefully than dual cores.

Of course, if you'll be first in line to buy a Nehalem processor when they come out, a quad-core probably isn't a good investment today.
 
If you upgrade frequently, then buy the "faster" dual core today, and check the playing field again in 6 months or so.

I keep my parts for several years, if possible, so I went with a quad. Also, the game that caused me to upgrade (Supreme Commander) does make some use of more than 2 cores, so a Q6600 was a no brainer for me.

Intel is going to start ramping down production of C2D (and C2Q also) in another year or so(I haven't looked at the roadmap specifics lately, my timing may be off a bit), so the argument is going to go away on it's own at that time.

Change is constant.:cool:

Don
 
Dual 8400 for now?

I don't see quad cor duplications being effectively used until a long time...look at when the 64bit amd cpus came out.
 
I don't see quad cor duplications being effectively used until a long time...look at when the 64bit amd cpus came out.
Click to expand...

But if it had been Intel with the first 64 bit CPU you can be sure that Microshaft would have been a wee bit quicker to come out the the 64 bit version of Windox. It took them, what, like 18 months after the X64 was released.

There is a steep learning curve for writing multithreaded apps. Once they figure it out, there will be a flood of compatible apps. There are just not very many yet. Like once the majority of apps were 16 bit, eventually they will all be 64 bit compatible and take advantage of several cores.

Don
 
Dual Core is your best bet unless you do a lot of encoding/rendering/compiling or any other straight number-crunching process that scales almost linearly with the number of cores.

As others have said, though, that will change in time.
 
For my next upgrade (from a overclocked X2 4200+ 939) I had my heart set on the new E8400 Wolfdale CPU. Although the E8400 is only dual core, it overclocked to around 4ghz on average and was dominant in many of the gaming benchmarks compared to quad cores, specifically the Q6600 (I believe this is pretty well known so I don't feel a need to cite a source). Many people will tell you that if you are a gamer than a dual core is the way to go and there is no need for the extra two cores when it comes to gaming. Since I am a mainly a gamer I felt this was the way to go and almost pulled the trigger on one at Microcenter for $189.99. Recently I have been doing a little more research and reading more about dual cores and quad cores and have come to a better decision (I believe).

There is no debate right now that there is very little software, apart from encoding programs, that utilize all four cores. After recently taking a look at the benchmark that was comparing a E8400 and a Q6600 in many different games, one caught my attention. Crysis, which is multithreaded and optimized for quad core, performed significantly better on a Q6600 than it did on a E8400. (Not too significant but enough to be recognized) Another article I was reading was talking about how Remedy Studios game, Alan Wake, can perform up to 30% faster using a quad core and the game is very optimized for quad core cpus.

With the future looking to favor the quad core cpu and my long time periods between upgrades, I have now been rethinking my decision. Before, I used to disregard the people that would say "Quad core is the FUTURE!" but now I believe that there might be some truth in that statement.
 
Killing2Live said:
There is no debate right now that there is very little software, apart from encoding programs, that utilize all four cores.
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True, but an important one that does effectively use all four is F@H. All you quad owners who are wondering what to do with your extra horsepower should look into folding. :)
 
Almost all apps benefit somewhat from the extra cache, but whether that is worth the extra price is up to you to decide. Most apps don't even take advantage of a dual core setup, so I personally feel quad core is more for bragging rights than anything else, unless you are actually using something that can take advantage of all four cores (F@H, encoding).
 
Well I'm in the process of building a new machine right now. Already have my case, motherboard, power supply, video card and I just ordered my RAM, but I can't quite pull the trigger yet beucase the Q9450 isn't available just yet. :mad:

IMO, if you're a gamer, multi-tasker, or any type of power user, there is no reason not to go quad these days, it may cost you $100 more, but really, that isn't much especially when you consider that you'll have atleast a good extra year of usage versus a dual core before needing to upgrade again. The past few months I've been really craving more power as I've found myself doing stuff that would have greatly benifited from an additional two cores. I got a new digital video camera so I've been doing a lot of editing and encoding, just about all newer games are multi-threaded, and while a dual core may be fine for most of them, a quad would help in several.

Basically my point is, for ~$100 do you really want to take the chance that you may regret the purchase of a dual core shortly after you buy it? If you know for sure that it would not benifit, then by all means, save the $100, but if you think you may put it to good use, I say splurge for the extra 2 cores.
 
Buy today's tech today, tomorow's tech tomorrow. That is all.
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But what if you expect to have todays tech next week, like me. An extra 50 bux now can save me having to replace an entire system in 2 years. Look, until last week, I was running Geforce 4600's for Pete's sake.

It's called forsight and planning.

Sometimes a cute tag line may not fit all situations. You need to look at each person's situation and make the best decision to fit. Not everyone should buy a Quad right now, but for some of us, it is a better deal, today and tommorrow.

Don
 
Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to gaming and choosing between dual and quad cores is that even though many games may run just as good or a little better on a faster clocked dual core versus a slower quad core in reviews, is that those reviews are running a bare minimum installation. Generally just the OS+drivers, nothing more. Most of us will have many more processes running in the background than are running in those reviews, especially if you're running Vista. I've got a dual monitor setup with the sidebar running on the 2nd monitor with 5 gadgets loaded and it would be nice not to have to close it out becuase I do like to glance over and peak at my CPU/MEM utilization and temps. I'm willing to bet that a quad core will be affected far less than a dual core would be, especially on a CPU intensive game like UT3, CoD4, Crysis, and SupCom.
 
Mithent said:
It's true that you are "going to leave 2 cores idle more often than not", at the moment.

I went for a quad myself. I intend to keep this computer for 3-4 years without upgrading the motherboard/CPU/RAM, and I imagine that quad-cores will be in a better position in the future. It's inevitable that developers will increase multi-threading; maybe 8 cores will be hard to program for, but I'm sure that 3/4 will be feasible, and developers aren't going to want to leave most of the power of these chips idle.
Click to expand...

I don't think that's true. Personally, I never just have one game open. I'll have a game, one or twenty firefox tabs, media player, sidebar with a few gadgets, a generally 2 or 3 other things at any given time. Even when I do only have a few programs running the load is well distributed between all 4 cores. (I have been keeping half an eye on it for the past month or so.) It's much more true to say that you won't use 100% on all cores most of the time.

Also, my point about multi-threading is that if it's done right 2 or 4 or 8 or 32 cores shouldn't matter, because the code will be written to use as many cores as are available, not a set number.
 
When Nahalem comes this fall/winter we will see on die load balancing (single thread applications split up into 4 or 8 cores) and a new version of hyperthreading.. I am excited :p
 
coolxboxgamer said:
When Nahalem comes this fall/winter we will see on die load balancing (single thread applications split up into 4 or 8 cores) and a new version of hyperthreading.. I am excited :p
Click to expand...

if it comes out thsi fall which i HIGHLY doubt it. intel will wanna milk the current penthyns for at least a year before releasing nelam
 
aethelwulf said:
I don't think that's true. Personally, I never just have one game open. I'll have a game, one or twenty firefox tabs, media player, sidebar with a few gadgets, a generally 2 or 3 other things at any given time. Even when I do only have a few programs running the load is well distributed between all 4 cores. (I have been keeping half an eye on it for the past month or so.) It's much more true to say that you won't use 100% on all cores most of the time.

Also, my point about multi-threading is that if it's done right 2 or 4 or 8 or 32 cores shouldn't matter, because the code will be written to use as many cores as are available, not a set number.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's true; multi-tasking is inherently well-suited to a multi-core processor, and when you multi-thread things like video encoding that scales well with many cores. People tend to be thinking about games though, which was more where I was coming from - they're rather harder to multi-thread because everything is so dependent on everything else, and it's hard to make independent threads which don't need much synchronising between them (unlike 'processing a data set' tasks, including compression, encryption, video encoding etc. where each thread is given a data set to crunch which doesn't change depending on other threads, nor does anyone care whether it's done faster or slower than the other threads as long as it's done). With games, an AI thread will depend on a physics thread which will depend on a thread monitoring object positions which will depend on user input, so it's more complicated to get everything working together and it's not possible to just spawn n threads which will be sent off with predefined tasks to report back when they're done.

jonneymendoza said:
if it comes out thsi fall which i HIGHLY doubt it. intel will wanna milk the current penthyns for at least a year before releasing nelam
Click to expand...

Well, it will probably "come out" in the same way that Penryn processors "came out" Q4 last year, ie they sell an Extreme Edition that almost no-one buys but gets everyone excited about the more affordable ones to come in Q1 the next year.
 
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