Weekend Open Forum: How many cores power your PC?

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Jos

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We asked you this very same question over a year and a half ago. Back then, dual core processors were already quite common and quad core parts were coming down in price to more affordable levels -- you could get one from either Intel or AMD for around $235-265. Then a few months later, on November 2008, Intel secured its dominant market position by launching the Nehalem line-up that has been sitting comfortably atop the performance charts ever since.

Fortunately, competition hasn't slowed down in the entry level and mainstream segments. Unable to keep up with today's fastest offerings, AMD has made a solid effort to deliver balanced value and performance on all its chips, keeping Intel on its toes or at least putting enough pressure on them when it comes to pricing. They further emphasized this by introducing their first six-core desktop part earlier this week, priced quite lower than Intel's Core i7 980X.


Of course, these chips are not meant to compete against each other, but the fact remains, today you can get a full range of CPUs manufactured on more efficient processes and with up to six cores, for little over $200. That's something anyone who carries out heavily threaded tasks such as intensive 3D work or video encoding can certainly appreciate.

With that in mind we want to revisit this topic and ask you, how many cores are powering your PC today? Do you believe further increasing the number of processing cores will pay off in terms of actual performance given today's software standards? And if so, do you plan on upgrading to a six-core chip from Intel or AMD anytime soon?

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Still running Quad Cores here :D On my trusty Q6600 at 3.30.

Wanting to upgrade to a i7 930 though.
 
Still running my trusty Athlon X2 5200+, but planning to upgrade sometime in the future.
 
AMD X3 450 2.7GHZ That's the latest one I have on a desktop. The rest are Core 2 Duo, Centrino Duo and Pentium M on laptops, Pentium Dual-Core and Pentium M on Desktop. Wanted to get a quad core but that was the cheapest one with a good motherboard that I could have gotten. But I should be able to get a quad later on if I need one.
 
I'm running on an athlon xp 2800 plus. Pretty old I still have ide hard drives and disk drives followed by an agp 8x nvidia graphics card. Single core here. And yes I believe more cores will be necessary considering 3d is soon to appear on computers. Also windows is obviously on track with making their windows experience as graphic intensive as possible hopefully without another windows vista release. Let's hope these processors stay affordable though I used to pay around 400 to build a pc but now I'm building one and its costing me a pretty penny. I love my agp old *** system specs.
 
im running an intel e7400 at 3.8Ghz but i would love to own and i7 system either it be the i7 860 or the i7 930 either would be great also i have been looking at the new 6 core amd cpus :)
 
Honestly, I am very multicore.

At work, I use a 56 core beowulf cluster made out of 14 quad core boxes. This does work on MCNP, a code base used to do radiation shielding simulation and nuclear reactor analysis.

At home, I have a 16 core Opteron workstation with 32GB of ram. This machine does a lot of different work including things that require too much communication for a beowulf cluster to perform, my wife does statistical modeling a lot with it, and when we aren't using it we volunteer it to BOINC.

As for the six core, I am in the process of upgrading to one for the central server of my cluster. The best thing about that cluster is that I have a semiannual budget for it and when I come under, I spend the difference on the best current machine and put the old machine as an additional cluster node.

When you do the work my wife and I do, we are always looking for more cores and better communication layers. But it has to be cost competitive. A $1000 six core doesn't make sense when you can buy 2 entire quad core computers for that price and link them to get the job done.
 
I have an AMD Athlon 6400+ (dual core) in one running Win XP MediaCenter. And a
Phenom X4 9950 (quad core) in the other with Win7 professional 64bit in the other wich is
my gaming rig
 
2 cores on my main PC.
1 core on my laptop (PowerPC G4 even)
2 cores on my media PC
1 core on my netbook

Most of my time is still spent on 1 core machines.
 
Quad x 2 (Core i7 950...mostly stock+turbo, C2Q 9400 3.33-3.6GHz...mostly)
Single core P4 (Skt 478) for troubleshooting customers PC's.

Yes....provided you use the software that takes advantage of multithreaded CPU's, although parallel computing in the main is limited at present.
No....I don't see a need in the short term to personally upgrade to a six-core CPU. Until a new architecture offers a tangible performance increase over what I already run (P4 excepted) I'll stay pat.
 
im useing AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition unlocked to quad core overclocked to 3.4 ghz for $100 i got some now thats like a amd 965.

highest was able to overclock stable was 4.22ghz in daul core mode only but didn't want to push it. highest in quad core was 3.93ghz
running on Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P Motherboard

with amd ati 4870x2 2gb gddr5

8gb of ddr2 daul channel 1066mhz ram

a 2.5tb hard drive
 
I recently upgraded to a CORE i5 750 on a H57 motherboard and a GTX 470. Earlier I was having a Pentium 4 system with a CRT display.
 
I work in 3D and honestly nothing beats an i7... I got the i7 930 (revision of the 920) a month or so ago and managed to overclock it to 4.01Ghz with 12GB of ram... The thing rips apart my old Quad core (Q9650) which I now use for network rendering...

I will be grabbing the new hexa-cores from intel and overclocking them too just to built a bit more on my render farm...
I'll have a prometeia phase change cooling unit soon also so that will be interesting to overclock with!
 
Intel Q9550 ( Work machine)
AMD Athlon II x2 7750 @ 3.5 Ghz (built for my wife)
AMD 64 x2 4200 ( my daughters webkins machine)
AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE @ 3.9Ghz (my gaming machine)
AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE ( TEC cooled project im working on)
and a dual core Pentium Acer Laptop

....so as you can see, im running at 52.42 Ghz .....on air! :p
 
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