Wow! what a processor at a price

[Radio Fixer]

From reading the excellent book "Chip Wars" I was interested in the high end 3D one that the US is trying to prevent China being able to make themselves.  The one in the pic has 16 cores and my understanding is that these core need software written to take advantage of the parallel processing.

My now old AMD chip is 6 core and I wonder if I have any software that makes use of them?

Only thing current is W10 maybe that does?  Everything else is a few years old

Thanks Gary

[ppppenguin]

If you're not doing high performance gaming, heavy duty maths or serious video editing even a modest CPU will work just fine on your desktop. My 7 year old main PC uses an Intel i7-4790t which does my everyday tasks just fine. It helps to have plenty of RAM (I have 16GB) and solid state disk for at least the operating system. If you replace "spinning rust" with an SSD you'll see a huge jump in performance.

I've just looked up the CPU benchmark figures for the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (AMD's latest) and it's over 63000. My ancient i7 is about 7000 which was a good price/performance trade-off when I bought the PC.

[Refugee]

I had a quick prod and found a whole family of i9 processors.
They go up to 24 cores.
https://www.cclonline.com/bx8071513900k-...pu-394889/

[joebog1]

They certainly do !!! and they go to 12 digit price brackets too!!.
For yapping on an antique radio/electronics forum, they are a small little tiddly bit over the top.
Then you need 256 gigs worth of super fast RAM. NOT to mention an SSD that works at light speed.

Tongue in cheek, but I dream of them too!!


Joe

[Nick]

I run a desktop machine with an i7-12700K processor and 32GB of DDR5 RAM...

...but I run a digital publishing business and regularly work with processing files of 100s of MB and sometimes more than a GB in size.

Even so, for 90% of the time the host is vast overkill - the maximum number of simultaneous threads I use is about 8 which equates to 4 cores (hyperthreading effectively doubles the number of physical cores). This processor has 20 threads split over 12 cores, 8 of which are "performance" and the rest are lower power usage.

With the on-chip caching etc, this equates to several BILLION transistors on a single chip.

If I do 3d modeling and rendering or big database operations, I get close to the limits of the machine. It's about 6 times faster for a given task than my previous PC.

But this is a commercial machine running heavy loads - it's massive overkill for all but specialist users running applications that can take advantage of the available features - for normal users running Microsoft office or Linux with similar apps, it's like buying 12 cars when you can only drive one at a time - the other 11 sit in the garage gathering dust!

Note that these sorts of hosts need to be balanced: the motherboard and memory  must be fast enough to not throttle throughput, the SSDs need likewise to be super fast - not all SSDs are anything like comparable. We use gen 4 M.2 NVMe superfast SSDs that are motherboard mounted just like a memory DIMM. If doing visual work, e.g. editing massive video files, then you need a superfast video card to be able to keep up - these can cost well over £1k on their own. Oh, and then (at least two) super fast high resolution and high contrast screens.

The PSU and cooling is matched to the motherboard - we use liquid cooling as that's now easy to do and far more efficient. Even so, idling this machine uses 100W which equates to about 880kwh over a year, or over £330 pa of electricity. So like all otherwise permanently powered equipment, when not in use it is put to sleep.

For 99% of all PC users, it's absolutely pointless having a host anything like this. If you are a madly competitive gamer or specialist commercial user, then yes, maybe

[joebog1]

Thanks Nick,
Your machine is one processor above mine. I have an i7 10700K, 32 gigs ram, and two M2.NVME SSD,s.
SSD,s run as RAID1 so if one dies I can boot from the other. Its fan cooled, but its as BIG a fan as fits in the desktop case.
700 watt gold power supply.
Bootup from dead cold power on, is 7 seconds. By deadcold I mean switch the electrickery on from the power point.
64 bit Linux, and its a superb, superfast desktop for an almost 70 year old. It doesnt have any windows though, it runs in total darkness.
Its used for answereing posts on old electronics discussion groups . :-) :B
I have been wondering how to answer this thread, and after reading your post I added mine.

Joe

[Radio Fixer]

Very interesting and educational replies. Of course I realised there was no point in having those exotic processors for ordinary radio hobby work.

What I didnt get, in the answers, was that those multi-core processors need software written for them to take advantage: thats my thinking anyway. The other parts was is there likely to be any software on my 5 year old PC that has software that uses more than one core of the 6 core AMD processor. I was thinking W10 could possibly.

thanks Gary

[Nick]

All modern operating systems will use all the cores the system has available IF NECESSARY!

However, almost nothing an ordinary user does uses more than one or possibly two threads at a time. On Windows, in Task Manager you can monitor either the overall CPU usage, or in the view options, each core individually... That way you can see what actually is happening.

So:
More cores: ability to do more things at the same time. Only useful if you are really doing lots of things in parallel and have applications than can exploit all those extra cores.

Faster cores: ability to do an individual task quicker. Only really important if you run compute-intensive tasks and want them done quicker.

Neither of the above are important for general users doing email/word processing etc.

If you are a gamer, then both are important; if a business power user, likewise.

[ppppenguin]

I'm no longer doing FPGA (field programmable gate array) designs so no longer need to keep up in the arms race between bigger devices and computer power. The journey from original VHDL code, via optimisation through to a placed and routed design is compute intensive. There are plenty of occasions when I had to let a job run over a long lunchtime, though I never quite got to needing it to run overnight.

My 7 year old main PC, mentioned a few posts ago, gave me a several fold improvement in compile times compared to its predecessor. I chose a compromise between cost and performance and reckon I made the right choice. It's still an entirely adequate machine for all everyday needs. The 16GB RAM and SSD (system disk) are a great help. Using a second SSD as the data disk would speed up jobs like zipping large file sets, dealing with big PDFs and other disk intensive jobs. It would not have helped with FPGA work which needs compute power and RAM.

[Mark Hennessy]

On Windows, in Task Manager you can monitor either the overall CPU usage, or in the view options, each core individually...

On this W10 build (22H2) at least, it's not on the View (or Options) menus. Perhaps it used to be once upon a time, or perhaps that's where it is on W11?

For me, I right-click on the graph and go to the "Change graph to" item - the top one on the context menu - which gives you those choices...