Processors help

[ritaheed]

Can someone explain the need for 4 X a 3.2ghz i7 processor in a single computer.

From what ive been told this doesnt make the comp run at over 13ghz but only at 3.2ghz

Anyone wanna explain the need, benefits etc

[ritaheed]

any computer heads out there want to answer this??

[teknorich]

Do you mean a quad core processor mate?

I'm a little sketchy on exactly how it tots up, but my own laptop is 2.53ghz dual core, and I can play games which requires say a 3ghz single core processor.

I don't think it is as simple as saying 2 x 2.53 = 5.06 ghz processor (in my case) but it certainly does boost you past the single core capability or I'd not be able to play a good few games which I can do.

Normally, the benefit of multiple cores is that the program can assign different tasks to run on different cores simultaneously, so instead of processes queuing up to all run on the same core, they can run on two cores, or four etc so the application can work faster/more efficiently. It does depend on the program tho, and some are not written to support multi-core precesors, tho the majority of newer programs will at least support dual core, if not quad.

[ritaheed]

Cheers for that info mate, here's the link to one of the comps and have a look at the specs

it doesn't mention its a quad core processor so unsure

Intel i7 Desktop computer pc i7 2600k 500GB HD 8gb DDR3 Memory dvd rewriter i739 | eBay (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250925774658)

[qUE]

Can someone explain the need for 4 X a 3.2ghz i7 processor in a single computer.

From what ive been told this doesnt make the comp run at over 13ghz but only at 3.2ghz

Anyone wanna explain the need, benefits etc

No, multi-core isn't as simple as "times the speed by the number of processor cores"
It's also made worse by the actual speed of the core isn't the speed of how many instructions it can process per second, because each processor core has multiple pipes and can process multiple independent instructions. It also goes the other way where you can have processing stalls due to instruction dependencies. Basically the processing speed isn't linear at all.

My very rough rule of thumb and it's probably wrong since I last looked, is the efficiency of a processor core in comparison to its paired cores is like this;

First core = 100% processing
Second core = 80% processing of first core
Third core = 80% processing of second core
etc.

This is due to the instructions having to be routed to the relevant processor core, plus all the cores have to access the same RAM, etc. So you've got transfer stalls there also. Probably take 20% from overall for that.

You've also got to consider that cores are normally controlled by software, so if the software doesn't use the cores properly, the performance will stink.

Truth is if each core was 3GHz and you had four of them, I wouldn't expect it to perform much better than a 5GHz single chip.


TBH tho', I've never really had a problem with 1.xGHz as a standard desktop machine for coding, audio and graphics. But then I don't use my machine for gaming and that is literally the only thing it doesn't do.