How future-proof is a quad-core?

[VirtualLarry]

I suspect you'll run into much of the same with the Q6600 systems, especially since they're only really economical to upgrade to 8gb at the most RAM-wise (DDR2). Add in some of the other limitations of your typical Q6600 system, ie: BIOS instead of UEFI, etc., for booting -- and yeah, the platform will find itself obsolete in a few years simply on that account.

Also, those boards have what, SATA-150 or SATA-300? Think rebuilding a RAID of 2-4 20Tb hard drives with only SATA-300 is going to be fun?? (my 2500+ board started life with a 40gb HDD and ended with 500gb HDDs -- so a scale factor of 15X isn't unrealistic!)

Similar deal with video. Embedded video is clearly the way of the future for most people. If you have some 8000x5000 display -- why buy a $70 video card to run it, when $70 is half way to a new motherboard with the video embedded?

That's an interesting comment. It does seem unlikely that 1TB 512byte-sector HDs are going to remain on the market for more than a year or two, at the current pace.

I'm hopeful that someone, somewhere, will come out with a GPT/EFI loader program, that boots off of a USB flash drive, enumerates your drives, and allows you to boot off of a GPT partition to an EFI-compatible OS. (Isn't something similar used by Hackintoshes?)

As far as video cards go, for UHD resolutions like that, I would just pick up another video card, with whatever new digital output interface is necessary for those monitors. I somehow doubt that PCI-E is going away any time in the next 5-10 years. We might be on PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 by then, but hopefully, they will remain backwards-compatible, if a bit slower because of that.

 

[jihe]

IDC,


IMO a single core isn't usable at all except for basic functions.... Unless were talking about a SB single core.

Actually I am stuck on an ancient thinkpad T42 with a 2Ghz dothan. It's surprising what it can do. I have no problem with windows 7, office, youtube flash, even can game a little.

 

[Ross Ridge]

That's an interesting comment. It does seem unlikely that 1TB 512byte-sector HDs are going to remain on the market for more than a year or two, at the current pace.

I don't see why. I can still go to the store an buy a 80GB IDE hard drive. Perfect for some 15 year old machine that doesn't support anything bigger 120GB.

I'm a bit surprised there already isn't a Hackintosh like solution for booting Windows off of a GPT partitioned disk, but I guess there's not a lot of demand for it now. There aren't a lot of 3 TB disks out there, and other operating systems don't need it. Linux can boot just fine off a GPT partitioned 3TB disk without using EFI.

Anyways, I can't see a quad-core CPU sold today becoming obsolete for the general use anytime soon. Current motherboards support at least 16GB of RAM, but few people can benefit today from more than 4GB. If you're a major downloader you can always use more disk space, but a lot people aren't and already have more disk space than they can use. Monitor resolutions aren't going to double in size, they've remained pretty constant over the years.

We're reaching the limits of PC technology. Whether it's because of limits in the hardware, like single-core performance, or limits of the software to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, the pace of progress has slowed. It's really only the embarassingly parallel applications, like GPUs and graphics, where we're still seeing relatively quick obsolence. And even that's become limited by software, where game development budgets aren't growing as fast as GPU performance.

I retired my old single-core 2.66GHZ Pentium 4 system a year ago after 7 years, and replaced it with a quad-core 2.66GHZ i5-750. Outside of games the performance difference is largely indistinguishable, only a few tasks taking enough time for me to notice the difference. Games are a huge improvement, but that's as much or more because my old crappy ATI 9550 got replaced with an ATI HD 5770. I expect my current system, with maybe a video card upgrade along the line, to last just as long and much more comfortably.

 

[deimos3428]

It's been ten years since the introduction of the first dual core

Unless you're referring to something older than the Pentium D or Athlon 64 X2, they've only been around since May 2005.

 

[TheDrD]

for gaming? do you think game developers got the time and money to code a game for 8 cores? who wants to write cpu bound games anyway? we got enough benches out there plus the bad ports is doing the job at the moment.

Yea why not for gaming? The direction toward multi core gaming is obvious. These days you need at least a Dual Core for gaming, and some of the new games these days almost require a Quad Core to run them well (I'm thinking of Bad Company 2 here).

 

[jihe]

Yea why not for gaming? The direction toward multi core gaming is obvious. These days you need at least a Dual Core for gaming, and some of the new games these days almost require a Quad Core to run them well (I'm thinking of Bad Company 2 here).

PC gaming is held back by consoles. Not many would write a PC game that doesn't port to console, and the console CPU power is rather pathetic.

 

[wuliheron]

Unless you're referring to something older than the Pentium D or Athlon 64 X2, they've only been around since May 2005.

Whatever date you choose, the fact remains even dual core home computers are still around and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Being able to add all those extra cores on a chip means the manufacturers also have the option of putting other things on them instead including just about everything but system ram and storage. Until at least HD multimedia graphics become cheap and ubiquitous on the same chip I don't see dual core processors becoming obsolete.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Yea why not for gaming? The direction toward multi core gaming is obvious. These days you need at least a Dual Core for gaming, and some of the new games these days almost require a Quad Core to run them well (I'm thinking of Bad Company 2 here).

No they dont. They require 2 highly clocked cores to run them. If your cpu gets hit in a game then

1. either your CPU is very old
2. Your playing at a low resolution

The gaming industry is fragile. You can have a award winning game out now your next game can be a flop then your a goner. Out of business. They cant make mistakes and cant wait too long to release a game otherwise your going under. To thread a game for a lot of cores takes time and money something the gaming companies dont have bundles off.

Then theres still the issue. there are twice as many people using XP than Vista and 7 combined! Nowwhere do you aim at to make money? The majority or the minority?

 

[Swamp]

For me Dual Core is junk. But it all depends on what your going to be doing. For gaming, depends on the game. Like encoding anything on that order, if you wanna spend hours doing it w/ a DC have fun. But for the price of a good dual core, you can get a good quad core.

Really no point in buying a DC, for same price or a lil more you can get a quad core.

 

[ZPIGS!]

How future-proof is a quad-core?

imho, software is what needs to catch up with hardware now..

i see so few apps correctly multi threading..

i even thought about some sort of additional layer between the os and apps that could somehow distribute thread requests to lower used cores, a sort of thread distribution service...but then i snapped out of it

i got a Q9400 and i'm not even thinking about upgrading it..windows and bad company 2 seem to multi thread nice and evenly from what i can see..but a lot of other apps do not!

only people who need vastly parallel processing on their platforms will be the drivers to more than 4 cores..and that can't be a majority of users, let alone sufficient enough to drive the market..

personally i think intel has got a bit ahead of itself..i can't see them making a lot of money in the near future..obviously new pc's need new cpus, but i think we're reaching a processing plateau..

ssd's have finally dragged primary storage to catch up with everything else and the revo drive pci-e based ones will give us another shot in the arm really soon (bit exp right now, imo)

graphics cards will continue their inexorable rise tho! (love the 580 and really looking forward to the 7000 series cards)

 

[Scotteq]

There is no such thing as "Future Proof".

When your current PC can no longer handle what you want it to do, then build a new one.

 

[Lightflash]

I can see QC CPUs lasting as long as someone is willing to buy them. Software really needs to become more threaded to get the most out of a processor, but we still have programs that are single or dual threaded. The cost to program the software is most likely the biggest reasoning behind the inability to use multiple cores.

 

[Phynaz]

I did mean "obsolete", as in, like a 486, not usable with today's software. Sure, it would still turn on and run, but it would be useless.

As long as the software would continue to run on the quad-core, even if it were somewhat slower than future 16-core chips, then it wouldn't be that obsolete, just slow.

I suppose another danger, is the adoption of future CPU extensions like AVX, that would indeed make a Q6600 obsolete, if things like web browsers required them. (For multimedia decoding, for example.)

Microsoft Office Professional 2010 System Requirements:

Processor 500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher.

Memory 256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher.

Hard Disk 1.5 GB; a portion of the disk space will be freed after installation if the original download package is removed from the hard drive.

Drive CD-ROM or DVD drive

Display 1024x768 or higher resolution monitor.

Operating System
Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 3 (32-bit),
Windows Vista with SP1 (32-bit or 64-bit), 
Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit or 64-bit), 
Windows Server 2008 with SP2 (32-bit or 64-bit), 
Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit). 
Windows on Windows (WOW) (which allows installing 32-bit versions of Office 2010 on 64-bit operating systems) are supported.

Other
You don't need to replace hardware that is capable of running Office 2007; it will support Office 2010.

A computer bought in February 1999 will run the current release of Office. Twelve years later and it is not obsolete in that aspect. Not saying I'd want to be the one running it

 

[pitz]

Monitor resolutions aren't going to double in size, they've remained pretty constant over the years.

Yeah, thats the scary part. We've been stuck in this 1920x1200 / 2560x1600 rut for the past 2-3 years, and basically, theres' not a solid growth path ahead. But this will soon change.

My laptop's 15.4" display is 1920x1200, or roughly 196 lines per inch. I don't see why 24" LCDs can't do that as well. Which means 3200x2000 for the 24" form factor, or 4266x2666 for the 30" form factor.

 

[DominionSeraph]

The trend is to offload everything heavy to the GPU. Since PC gaming is dead, a quad should do you for a long time.

 

[deanx0r]

In today's market, the name of the game is no longer 'raw power', it is now 'efficiency'.

 

[Veliko]

Yeah, thats the scary part. We've been stuck in this 1920x1200 / 2560x1600 rut for the past 2-3 years, and basically, theres' not a solid growth path ahead. But this will soon change.

My laptop's 15.4" display is 1920x1200, or roughly 196 lines per inch. I don't see why 24" LCDs can't do that as well. Which means 3200x2000 for the 24" form factor, or 4266x2666 for the 30" form factor.

It's not likely to change soon simply because it is cheaper and easier for LCD monitor manufacturers to churn out HDTV resoloution monitors and TVs.

 

[smakme7757]

Personally i don't feel you can future proof your PC, but you can build a PC that will do what you need it to do for a long period of time. For example, if you play games your PC will become obsolete much quicker than someone who uses a PC purely for word processing and email, but at the same time that gaming machine which can no longer run the latest games will be perfect for pretty much any other task.

If you're building a new PC today then a quad core is the way to go and will most likely hold its own for many years to come (even if you're just using word and email).

 

[Ross Ridge]

Yeah, thats the scary part. We've been stuck in this 1920x1200 / 2560x1600 rut for the past 2-3 years, and basically, theres' not a solid growth path ahead. But this will soon change.

Well 1200 line displays have been around for a couple of decades at least and there have been monitors capable of 1600 lines for a long time too. What's changed is the switch from 4:3 to 16:10 displays, so you've got more horizontal pixels now, but otherwise things are about the same as they've always been.

My laptop's 15.4" display is 1920x1200, or roughly 196 lines per inch. I don't see why 24" LCDs can't do that as well. Which means 3200x2000 for the 24" form factor, or 4266x2666 for the 30" form factor.

Oh, it's theoretically possible to build a panel with those resolutions, but 3200x2000 would be pushing the limit of what even DisplayPort can handle, and 4266x2666 would be beyond it. The current trend is actually in the opposite direction, if ever so slightly. Aspect ratios are now switching from 16:10 to 16:9 and losing a bit of horizontal resolution in the process.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Ummm...some of you guys live in dream land if you think quads are going to be useless for gaming in a few years.

You do understand how dominant consoles are? As long as we are stuck to crappy console hardware then quads are fine. Once we get the new consoles THEN I expect we may see some real push and then we will start to see quads struggle in high end gaming. But that's still at least 5 years away.

For desktop usage....forget it. Duals will be enough for a long time. Especially if they have a SSD in the pc. My wifes dual core AMD 7750 runs Windows 7 without breaking a sweat. I somehow doubt Windows 8 is going to increase system load at all considering there is a clear move to more efficient computing

 

[dudeofdur]

check out google's new language google Go. It'll be easy to support multiple cores in it, so I would say not very. However more and more cores will likely be tacked onto processors so it depends on your definition of future proof

 

[GFORCE100]

My little eye tells me that overall (taking into account all types of users) another 2-4 years and you'll both need and want to be on 6-8 cores by then. Programmers will continues to make use of multi-threading more and more. Software doing is merely (for mos part) scratching the surface when it comes to SMT.

Other than that there will be other reasons such as further extensions to the CPU instruction set, lower power consumption, and as always friskier single thread performance.

 

[GundamF91]

For dedicated machines, for gaming or video rendering, you're going to be able to do 8core or even 16, but 4 is a pretty sweet spot and plenty for normal use.

But Quad core obsolete? No way! Not even single core is obsolete, the reason is that the concept of computing is changing. Miniturization is sweeping in, and you're going to have ubiqutous computing everywhere, and the cores are going to be in many different devices, many times even a single core will do.

 

[JimmiG]

imho, software is what needs to catch up with hardware now..

i see so few apps correctly multi threading..

i even thought about some sort of additional layer between the os and apps that could somehow distribute thread requests to lower used cores, a sort of thread distribution service...but then i snapped out of it

i got a Q9400 and i'm not even thinking about upgrading it..windows and bad company 2 seem to multi thread nice and evenly from what i can see..but a lot of other apps do not!

It's not just a matter of "catching up". Some operations, by their nature, will always depend on the result of an earlier operation. A computer that can do 16 unrelated tasks at once is great for some things, but sometimes you need to perform many tasks that are somehow related and dependent on each other. What matters then is how quickly you can complete each individual task, not how many you can perform at the same time. I can think of many real-world examples that mirror this.

Therefore, I think multi-threading is a dead end with a hard limit on how much you can "optimize". Quad core has been around for 5 years and most games still only use about 2 - 2.5 cores.

 

[StinkyPinky]

How exactly is single core obsolete??

We have some Pentium 4's at work. Sure they're crap compared to the Core2s but they still run Windows and Office etc quite nicely.