core count = future proof?

[superccs]

When will my 1055T be an outdated processor?

I got this chip because the board running my E8400 went to hell and I found a nice combo at Fry's for $200. A 6 core CPU seemed the way to go as at the time it appeared that apps were looking to get more effectively written to take advantage of multicore CPUs.
I can get it to 3.7Ghz at +/- 1.35 volts on my DDR3 890GX board...
I game with it and all the usual stuff, encode movies every now and then, photoshop yadda yadda...
My question is when does a new $200-300 cpu start to make sense for you all?
The CPU I was running priot to my E8400 was a Athlon 3500+ on a 939 platform.

 

[Abwx]

It wont be outdated before years thanks to its 6 cores
that are still not fully used by most softs.

As times goes by , its perfs will be better with better parralelized softs.

 

[Nemesis 1]

WAIT for it wait for it 6 years it should be very useful and vary slow

 

[Idontcare]

My question is when does a new $200-300 cpu start to make sense for you all?

I upgraded from a perfectly functioning Q6600 to a 2600K and it made no sense at all for me to do that.

My movie transcode time got cut in half, but since I always ran those at night while I'm asleep it doesn't really matter that it finishes in 2hrs instead of 4hrs.

But I like the extra snappiness and zip when doing everyday stuff - all my office apps are noticeably zippier. But not enough to claim that the $300 upgrade was money well spent.

And don't forget that you can't just upgrade the CPU for a cool $200-300, you have to upgrade the mobo (and in my case, the ram) as well.

 

[daveybrat]

I upgraded from a perfectly functioning Q6600 to a 2600K and it made no sense at all for me to do that.

My movie transcode time got cut in half, but since I always ran those at night while I'm asleep it doesn't really matter that it finishes in 2hrs instead of 4hrs.

But I like the extra snappiness and zip when doing everyday stuff - all my office apps are noticeably zippier. But not enough to claim that the $300 upgrade was money well spent.

And don't forget that you can't just upgrade the CPU for a cool $200-300, you have to upgrade the mobo (and in my case, the ram) as well.

QFT, that's why i still have no plans to upgrade my 960T Unlocked to 6-Core and overclocked. I know my system will be faster if i upgrade to a new Ivy-bridge, but i don't even come remotely close to stressing my cpu as it is.

So until a game or software title comes out that finally pushes my system, i'll just have to be happy.

 

[MisterMac]

Thuban is a great SKU.
I'm amazed they could create that out of barcelona\phenom 1 - and then bring out bulldozer -_-
History repeats itself...

But given the nature of 2-4 threads and ST performance don't they already choke slightly on SC2 or BF3(example) in heavy populated instances?

(assuming you have no gpu neck what so ever).

 

[Sable]

Moar cores gif or stfu

 

[NTMBK]

Moar cores gif or stfu

10 core Xeon or GTFO

 

[mikeymikec]

When will my 1055T be an outdated processor?

What metric for "outdated" do you want to refer to? "Not in production any more"?

At the end of the day you've got that setup for a reason. When your needs are demanding more than it can provide, that's when I would look on it in an "outdated" (ie. negative) light.

I've got a 960T with two working unlockable cores which I'm keeping locked for now as they haven't made any noticeable/appreciable difference to performance. At the point that I want to try and get more out of it, I'll unlock those and perhaps consider overclocking it (though I don't really overclock any more, power usage and noise levels mean more to me). There are performance drops when I'm gaming with it (occasionally in SC2 or in a game like Batman AC, though I have the latter largely under control).

It depends how much you are into gaming, whether you play the latest games etc. My previous processor did the trick for about 7 years with system upgrades along the way.

 

[ShintaiDK]

More cores doesnt future proof anything.

 

[Smoblikat]

Its one of the best AMD chips out there. Beaten only by the 1090 and 1100T. Unless you want to go intel there is no upgrade path for you. It will last a few more years at least.

 

[LoneNinja]

Thuban is a great SKU.
I'm amazed they could create that out of barcelona\phenom 1 - and then bring out bulldozer -_-
History repeats itself...

But given the nature of 2-4 threads and ST performance don't they already choke slightly on SC2 or BF3(example) in heavy populated instances?

(assuming you have no gpu neck what so ever).

SC2 it chokes, but considering BF3(multiplayer) makes good use of 8 threads, the Phenom II X6 is actually noticeably faster than a Phenom II X4.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

^^which is probably slower than BF3 on an i3 2100.
Poor and I want competition again, things will get stale but in the short term this could be good allows software to catch up to hardware.

 

[superccs]

Seems like most of us are on the same page, 1055t is still a very good CPU.

It can be undervolted like crazy and run at stock speeds, or kept at stock volts and bumped up ~30-40%, or overvolted and run waaay out of spec

I'm guessing when a ~40W CPU comes along that can easily out gun my 1055T, blow it away with a decent overclock, and be packaged with a radically modernized platform (DDR7, USB4, SATA 12, PCIE 5 or whatever) that it will be time to move on.

 

[DominionSeraph]

More cores doesnt future proof anything.

My X2 5200+ will likely be good for another 5 years. If I had a single-core, I'd probably have upgraded 2-3 years ago.

More cores can make a heck of a difference.

 

[RaistlinZ]

More cores doesnt future proof anything.

This. Most of what you do doesn't fully use 6 cores anyway. IPC > cores for future proofing, IMO.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/147?vs=46

 

[BD231]

When will my 1055T be an outdated processor?

I got this chip because the board running my E8400 went to hell and I found a nice combo at Fry's for $200. A 6 core CPU seemed the way to go as at the time it appeared that apps were looking to get more effectively written to take advantage of multicore CPUs.
I can get it to 3.7Ghz at +/- 1.35 volts on my DDR3 890GX board...
I game with it and all the usual stuff, encode movies every now and then, photoshop yadda yadda...
My question is when does a new $200-300 cpu start to make sense for you all?
The CPU I was running priot to my E8400 was a Athlon 3500+ on a 939 platform.

Multi-threading for every day desktop use is a joke at the moment, it's a flawed technology that even the best programmers/engineers have trouble with so don't expect to see a thing out of that movement until hardware advance's enough to alleviate some of the drawbacks. It's advancing so slow your CPU will be worthless by the time six cores holds any kind of advantage over per core performance.

You should have upgraded while your CPU was still viable, you'd of saved yourself a lot of money. Ivy bridge is crap but the one positive out of it all is that it reduced the price of Sandy so now is still a good time. Might as well wait till haswell though.

 

[Idontcare]

Multi-threading for every day desktop use is a joke at the moment, it's a flawed technology that even the best programmers/engineers have trouble with so don't expect to see a thing out of that movement until hardware advance's enough to alleviate some of the drawbacks.

As a programmer I feel I have some credibility to weigh in here...the flaw is not in the technology IMO. Rather, the flaw is in the economic incentives in the programming industry itself when it comes to software.

On the desktop can you name one program other than file compression (winzip, winrar, 7zip, etc) that is actually competing in terms of performance for your dollars?

How many programmers out there are facing a situation where they either invest in developing seriously multithreaded apps or risk facing losing customers?

I can't think of any, not in the mainstream market segment, outside of file compression and file compression is the epitome of a niche software application.

So why would any software company being managed by decision makers (not programmers) decide to increase the budget and spend more money on programmers to develop even better multithreaded software? Where is the ROI in that?

People who buy Adobe photoshop are going to buy it regardless whether it is fully multithreaded or just partially multithreaded. So the economic incentive for Adobe to fund the project of creating the next version of photoshop is basically to target a slight token improvement in multithreaded performance and push it out the door because they know people will buy it regardless the performance.

Even programs that are heavily multithreaded like povray and TMPGenc you are looking at customers basing their purchasing decisions not on performance but on feature set and capability.

I buy TMPGEnc not for its multithreaded performance but for its ease of use and uncompromised capability in extracting very good image quality at very low bitrates. I don't know a single person who prioritizes transcoding speed over transcoding quality when it comes time to open their wallet and buy the software.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I beleive the situation with multithreaded apps in the consumer space is what it is. Consumers don't base software purchasing decisions on the performance of that software, they base their software purchasing decisions on the capability of that software.

Even in gaming, I doubt you will find a single gamer who wanted to buy BF3 but chose not to because BF3 wasn't multithreaded enough. If they wanted BF3 then they bought it (or stole it, but that's a different discussion) and if they didn't get the FPS they want then they upgraded the hardware until they were happy with the final result.

So if you are a software project manager what are you going to do when it comes to making decisions on how to invest your limited project development dollars? Are you going to tell your programmers to go after better multithreaded performance or are you going to tell them to make sure they include feature XYZ, regardless how slow or fast that feature ends up being, so that the customer decides to buy the software?

 

[blastingcap]

This. Most of what you do doesn't fully use 6 cores anyway. IPC > cores for future proofing, IMO.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/147?vs=46

I mostly agree. It's difficult to make many kinds of programs highly multithreaded.

Nevertheless, 2 cores with HT would be the minimum I'd consider if buying a new CPU for basic multitasking; heck even many games can at the bare minimum shove their audio and other threads onto a second core. IMHO, more than 4 cores is a waste for most consumers, though. Even the really parallel applications can often be run overnight or something.

On the desktop can you name one program other than file compression (winzip, winrar, 7zip, etc) that is actually competing in terms of performance for your dollars?

Do browsers count even though they are mostly/all free? Because I appreciate how modern browsers are more multithreaded now than before, even if they are mostly/all free these days. And the devs get paid indirectly via the platform and ad revenue and such so there is an incentive to boost web browser market share.

 

[Idontcare]

Do browsers count even though they are mostly/all free? Because I appreciate how modern browsers are more multithreaded now than before, even if they are mostly/all free these days. And the devs get paid indirectly via the platform and ad revenue and such so there is an incentive to boost web browser market share.

In my personal life I can tell you there are exactly zero people I know who give any consideration to the speed of a given browser when they made their personal choice to use that browser.

Take myself for example, I tried like mad to get to like chrome and then firefox but to no avail. I just didn't like the fonts and the way they functioned in general. So I am using IE9 which for my personality it just seems super intuitive.

If web pages are loading 0.25s slower because of my choice of using IE9 over chrome then I'll keep using IE9.

But I know I am not alone in this, I don't know anyone, not even my geeky engineering friends and coworkers, who pick one browser over the other simply because it is faster. But maybe I am the exception to the rule and most people do change browsers so they keep up with whoever is faster?

 

[blastingcap]

In my personal life I can tell you there are exactly zero people I know who give any consideration to the speed of a given browser when they made their personal choice to use that browser.

Take myself for example, I tried like mad to get to like chrome and then firefox but to no avail. I just didn't like the fonts and the way they functioned in general. So I am using IE9 which for my personality it just seems super intuitive.

If web pages are loading 0.25s slower because of my choice of using IE9 over chrome then I'll keep using IE9.

But I know I am not alone in this, I don't know anyone, not even my geeky engineering friends and coworkers, who pick one browser over the other simply because it is faster. But maybe I am the exception to the rule and most people do change browsers so they keep up with whoever is faster?

I'm sure some people out there do keep track of speed. It was an issue in the past, when people switched away from slower, clunkier versions of IE to nimbler Firefox. But admittedly the world has changed and the top browsers are all reasonably fast now.

The real reason why I switched from Firefox to Chrome way back in the day is that Firefox had some sort of memory leak issue that was driving me nuts. I guess they fixed it eventually, but it was super-annoying. I use IE9 as something of a zero-effort Chrome Incognito browser window; I have it set up to delete all cookies, history, etc. upon exit and it's also ultra-compatible with most websites, so whenever I don't want to be tracked for more than one browser session, I use it. I'm now trying to switch back to Firefox because I feel like there's too much conflict of interest with Google to track me for ad purposes and that I want to prop up a weakening Firefox userbase just to keep choice alive in the market.

For gaming purposes I have to say that I didn't buy software for multi-threadedness, but the other way around: I gave up the OP's 1055T CPU because I gave up waiting for games to become more multithreaded and because I was annoyed at how it bottlenecked my 7970 (at least at stock) in some games; now I'm on a 3570K@stock which no longer bottlenecks my GPU. An oc'd 1055T should be fine for a while longer, though, thanks to consolitis. We'll see how the new xbox and PS4 do and if they push gaming forward enough to warrant further CPU upgrades.

 

[BenchPress]

Multi-threading for every day desktop use is a joke at the moment, it's a flawed technology that even the best programmers/engineers have trouble with so don't expect to see a thing out of that movement until hardware advance's enough to alleviate some of the drawbacks.

Haswell's TSX technology is exactly that. It features hardware transactional memory and hardware lock elision. They make multi-threaded development much easier and synchronization more efficient.

 

[BenchPress]

And that, in a nutshell, is why I beleive the situation with multithreaded apps in the consumer space is what it is. Consumers don't base software purchasing decisions on the performance of that software, they base their software purchasing decisions on the capability of that software.

Those are connected. If a feature doesn't run at usable speed on the lowest spec machine they're targeting (to have a broad enough audience), it doesn't make it into the released product.

The lowest spec machine is also still often a single-core or early dual-core. It will take a while before quad-core becomes ubiquitous enough for the average software developer to justify multi-threaded development. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Slow increase in core count leads to slow multi-threaded software development, which leads to slow increase in core count.

The other issue is that multi-threaded development is notoriously hard. Bugs that depend on a race condition sometimes don't manifest for hours. Some developers just don't want to risk that. Multi-threaded development also has project-wide implications. If you don't do a proper job, and just try to bolt it on, performance can actually go down with more cores. It's a lot of work to restructure large projects, so a lot of companies haven't taken the plunge yet.

I believe Haswell will be an inflection point. It makes things much simpler and more effective, right at a time when quad-core becomes the norm and when the new consoles are released. So while it will still take years for TSX support to become widespread, it's a big incentive for developers to pick up multi-threaded development. And once the majority of software is multi-threaded, that should be a catalyst for multi-core sales.

 

[hokies83]

Multi cores have uses in programs etc.. but multi slow cores not so good for gaming.

But one of the best things we have seen from Intel which really shines on Ivy Bridge is it's video encoding and showing that 4 core / 8 threaded Faster cpu's are closing the gap in multi core apps.

 

[frozentundra123456]

My X2 5200+ will likely be good for another 5 years. If I had a single-core, I'd probably have upgraded 2-3 years ago.

More cores can make a heck of a difference.

I wont dispute that a dual core is "good enough", but I recently upgraded from a dual core intel to an i5. I upgraded mostly for gaming, but I am absolutely amazed at how much more pleasant and responsive the computer seems in normal use, even just web browsing and opening programs.

Granted, the upgrade also included a faster hard drive, more/faster ram, and a move from Vista to Win 7, but upgrading a "good enough" computer can bring pleasant benefits, even though I was doing everything I needed to on the old one.