Dual Core

Gurgle

From reading these boards, it sounds like everyone is upgrading to dual-core systems.

Question is why?

Is anyone doing anything that actually utilizes both cores?
Is there any software at all out there that uses both?

If so, what?

Or is everyone just 'future-proofing' in the hopes that developers are going to start splitting threads between available cores in the near future?

unklerosco

It can be handy for certain uses.. I built a pc recently thats main use is photo/video editing... Dual core came in very handy for the video editing..

Once u use it its hard to go back to single core, u can run more at once... It all depends on what u use ur pc for.. I'll be getting a dual core as the GF does a decent bit of video work herself so it'll be handy for that n i rip dvds often enough to warrant getting one...

By the time games etc start taking advantage of dual core i wouldn't be suprised if quad + cores will be common......

conzy

A lot of people have dual core now, Software like photoshop and animation programs like Bryce and 3d studio Max can utilize dual core, so can some DVD authoring software and a few games.

They are great and I plan to upgrade to a Dualcore in a few months, But If you have a decent CPU, I would wait a few months to see how the the new AMD and Intel CPUS perform, and until more software is supported.

If you want to go Dualcore now, The AMD X2 range have amazing performance, the x2 3800 is around €350 and the FX-60 is aound €1100:eek:

You might want to look at an opteron 165 or 170 if you overclock, all opterons also have 1mb L2 cache per core, where as the cheaper models in the X2 range have 512kb L2 cache per core

unklerosco

I got a 3800X2 in the system i built n overclocked it to 2.8 on air easy... Thats FX60 speeds for a fraction of the price... Should have kept the CPU as seemingly it was a great clocker..

zilog_jones

Games can already take advantage of multiple proc's/cores - even Quake 3 does! Windows 2000 and higher supports multiple cores and being a multi-threaded OS can always make use of them whenever multiple processes are running - same goes for any Linux running the SMP kernel.

Khannie

I posted a thread on this a while back and got few replies

Here's a list of multi-threaded apps. There's also a threaded version of xvid (grab the latest autogk) and it seriously improves encoding times.

Mostly what I like is being able to encode and play games at the same time. Nice touch that.

8T8

I went dual core mostly because I have various programs running at the same time and dual core really helps here keeping the OS and applications responsive.

I went with AMD because it offers better games performance vs Intel's dual core offerings. Games that use both cores are still thin on the ground but it will pick up later eventually, the boost dual core gives in multi-core aware games wont be that big but it will help in some areas.

Also worth mentioning is that AMD will no longer be making single core CPU's it's dual core or greater (quad core) from now on..

Hadoken

anybody wanting dual core might want to wait till next Jan..Intel will be releasing Quad Core processors..
Apparently their next generation of processors will rival AMD for both performance and watt usage..These will be released in the summer with the Quad core expected not long afterwards..I've seen the slideshows and the expected gains and I've been impressed..was leaning towards AMD but now reckon back to Intel especially giving the DDR3 will be out soon.
I was going to order myself a shiny new system but with so many advances coming this year..AMD supporting DDR2..Intel moving to DDR3, Vista, DX10 and the DX10 video cards, and finally quad-core I figure I'll hold tough till the end of the year. Even if I don 't go quad-core I'd still splash on a dual-core and at this time there definitely should be more apps/games written for these

Judt

Gurgle wrote:

From reading these boards, it sounds like everyone is upgrading to dual-core systems.

Question is why?

Is anyone doing anything that actually utilizes both cores?
Is there any software at all out there that uses both?

If so, what?

Or is everyone just 'future-proofing' in the hopes that developers are going to start splitting threads between available cores in the near future?

Not hoping, waiting. Dual core rigs do spectacularly well on the programs that use multiple threads now. But the software coders are only catching up with multiple threads (which has been around since HyperThreading) on mainstream products now. However it is not a speculative "Futureproof because they may do this...", it's a "Futureproof because they are doing this..."

unklerosco

Hadoken wrote:

anybody wanting dual core might want to wait till next Jan..

That word, "wait" that u used... Dont think there's many people round here that know what it means...:p

Next year looks like a good year tho, lots to look forward to..

conzy

Yup, next year will be crazy, Physx card, DX10 cards, 32gb DDR2 flash drives, PS3, Vista, Quad SLI, New AMD cpus, New intel CPUs, OCZ Budget Phase change cooler.....................

I am definately waiting a few months, If performance of the new tech isnt alot better, I will go Dual core on S939.

And DO NOT buy a Dual core Pentium 4 :eek: Its 2 prescotts duct taped together and they communicate through the FSB:rolleyes: And they consume as much power as a small house and they are hot enough to heat one:D

If you want intel wait for Conroe or desktop core Duo

Khannie

I'm not expecting massive amounts of software to be threaded (i.e. take advantage of 2 or more cores at once) in the near future. The engineering overhead of adding threading to any software application is massive. MASSIVE.

Games, yes, other stuff, no. Can't see myself shelling out for quad core within the next few years.

astrofool

not really Khannie. Its simple to make most programs threaded, the real problem is with the timing, i.e. having one thread waiting on another, so they'll all get slowed down by the slowest thread.

Ideally for a game, you could thread the AI seperate to the world update, seperate to the drawing methods, but all 3 threads would have to be completed for a frame to be drawn. Games are actually one of the hardest things to thread.

Khannie

:P I have a good understanding of threading. It's part of my job. For a lot of applications though it's hard to find tasks that you can actually complete in parallel. Not all applications actually lend themselves to useful parallelisation.

Complexity does increase a lot by adding threading though. Debugging becomes an absolute wh*re for example.

Gurgle

Khannie wrote:

Complexity does increase a lot by adding threading though. Debugging becomes an absolute wh*re for example.

Tell me about it :rolleyes:

Does windows not assign a core by application?
Or will it split threads from the same application among the cores?

Judt

Khannie wrote:

:P I have a good understanding of threading. It's part of my job. For a lot of applications though it's hard to find tasks that you can actually complete in parallel. Not all applications actually lend themselves to useful parallelisation.

Complexity does increase a lot by adding threading though. Debugging becomes an absolute wh*re for example.

Well gamers are traditionally the people who will be ahead of the curve, so it makes sense to go for it. For Joe User, go with what's cheapest for fulfilling your needs.

Mutant_Fruit

Windows will split different threads from single applications among different cores, but only if the application does have multiple threads. A lot of older applications would have to be rewritten in order to have multiple threads. The main benefit comes because you can now run two extremely processor heavy apps at the same time without them killing each other. Alternatively, you can run one extremely processor intensive process and still have a perfectly usable and responsive PC.

art

I always considered the advantage of dual cores to be not about running one application in dual mode but being able to run multi applications smoothly. Since going dual core, the overall performance of my PC has increased in terms of the fact that there is less of me looking at one process hogging the cpu and being unable to do anything else until it finishes, etc. Plus I really like how I can start using WindowsXP before it has completed loaded.

nadir

I run gentoo , so dual core is massively important for me.

Khannie

Gurgle wrote:

Does windows not assign a core by application?
Or will it split threads from the same application among the cores?

Yeah, as mutant said, windows is clever enough to split the threads over each core. My processor's currently running at 80% usage from one application (autogk). If you wanted to play games though, you could set the affinity of the process to one core and it will only take up 50% (you're essentially restricting it to using only one core). I do this if I'm running autogk and playing a game.

Nadir: Why do you think that dual core is more important for linux?

zilog_jones

I wouldn't be surprised if the linux SMP kernel did a much better job at handling multiple CPUs/cores than Windows, though that's just an assumption.

Anyway regarding programs using multiple threads - most do. Look in Performance Monitor (in Windows) and you'll see most processes have many threads. For example I'm playing music in Winamp now, and it has 18 threads! Only thing is most of them aren't actually doing anything most of the time - I can only see 2 threads (and occasionally a third or fourth) taking up any processor time, and it's possible some of them can't run at the same time due to use of mutual exclusion (i.e. designing the program so more than one thread needing to access one resource can, while not destroying things).

The only programs I can see running here with only one thread are ctfmon (something to do with the language bar), the crappy system tray thing for my Epson printer, jusched (Sun Java Update Scheduler) and rundll32.

Khannie

You shouldn't see multiple applications under task manager for multiple threads AFAIK.

zilog_jones

...which is why I said Performance Monitor...

Mutant_Fruit

Anyway regarding programs using multiple threads - most do. Look in Performance Monitor (in Windows) and you'll see most processes have many threads.

All GUI apps are multithreaded. There is at least one thread for sceen updates and one for long hard calculating. Otherwise GUI's would freeze up when the app was doing some work. "Proper" multithreading would mean splitting the "hard work" into several threads. This is quite complicated.

nuttz

One could suggest that maybe one of the reasons Windows Vista has been delayed is for the Intel quad core chips to be released in January. Which might imply better OS performance, in addition to the OS being better 64bit compliant. Multithreading has been around forever. It's only becoming more important now.

conzy

If its that complicated to write games for multiple cores, What will the PS3 games developers do???:D

zilog_jones

nuttz wrote:

One could suggest that maybe one of the reasons Windows Vista has been delayed is for the Intel quad core chips to be released in January. Which might imply better OS performance, in addition to the OS being better 64bit compliant. Multithreading has been around forever. It's only becoming more important now.

In all fairness this multiple core stuff isn't that new though. Dual and quad processor x86 systems have been around since the Pentium Pro in 1995, and Microsoft have been supporting multi-CPU systems properly since NT4 (dunno about NT3 actually). I know these would have only really been in servers, but Microsoft should definately know their stuff by now - at least on a low-level OS basis.

nadir

Khannie wrote:

Nadir: Why do you think that dual core is more important for linux?

Not linux specifically, but gentoo, becauuse it's ports based you compile your whole system, so thats alot of compiling. gcc makes full use of both cores, just pass the -j2 option to make.conf and it does the rest.
So basically twice the speed for updating.

Also since the linux kernel is opensource, it has been hacked to bits by lots of individuals/groups and companies who need it for custom multiprocessing purposes. This is why all the main clusters use linux/unix systems, afaik windows compute cluster doesnt support ininiband yet, and is lacking in several areas. I'd imagine Microsoft dont have the same resources available to them as kernel.org do, they couldn't really be developing different kernels depending on the needs of each individual client who requires their own optomisations.
quite alot of apps in linux now are properly threaded too, it's debateable, but I've always been impressed witht he benchmarks from linux SMP setups.