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nMP what do you guys think?

iceman42 said:
you don't need more than a quad core.there is no program that uses 4 cores its just a waste of money.
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Not true at all. Many pro apps use multiple cores for rendering and processing. Off the top of my head, theses apps that I use do it: FCP X, Resolve, Autopano, Compressor, and many games using the Unity engine
 
A lot of video software can make use of every core and CPU you can throw at it. Compressor and Handbrake are good examples because they transcode entire videos. Video work is often easily divided into chunks, which makes it particularly suitable for multi-threading.
 
ActionableMango said:
A lot of video software can make use of every core and CPU you can throw at it. Compressor and Handbrake are good examples because they transcode entire videos. Video work is often easily divided into chunks, which makes it particularly suitable for multi-threading.
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And don't forget that many people multi-task - while one app is running, they run other apps as part of their workflow. Even if the "one app" can't use all the cores, the "unused" cores are available for parallel independent tasks.
 
AidenShaw said:
And don't forget that many people multi-task - while one app is running, they run other apps as part of their workflow. Even if the "one app" can't use all the cores, the "unused" cores are available for parallel independent tasks.
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In my experience, only on system where you can control on which core to run an app do you benefit from this. The OS bultin load balancing is pretty much a crapshoot and more often then not you end up with many processes on core #1 and just about nothing on the other cores.

I know that you are quite experienced with server OSes and infrastructure but on the desktop it isn't quite as streamlined and optimized.

I used to use an utility like Prio on XP and 7 to configure my apps to run on different core in the past.
 
tuxon86 said:
In my experience, only on system where you can control on which core to run an app do you benefit from this. The OS bultin load balancing is pretty much a crapshoot and more often then not you end up with many processes on core #1 and just about nothing on the other cores.

I know that you are quite experienced with server OSes and infrastructure but on the desktop it isn't quite as streamlined and optimized.

I used to use an utility like Prio on XP and 7 to configure my apps to run on different core in the past.
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We often agree - but on this one my experience has been the opposite.

Recent Linux systems and Windows Vista and later have very good multi-core scheduling. About the only way to screw things up is to manually peg apps to cores.
 
AidenShaw said:
We often agree - but on this one my experience has been the opposite.

Recent Linux systems and Windows Vista and later have very good multi-core scheduling. About the only way to screw things up is to manually peg apps to cores.
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Looking at my current process list on Win7 at work, my CPU1 is at 40% while my 7 other core are near or at 0%...
This is annecdotal, but this is what I see on my workstation or my employees one. Of course, if the devs that created those apps running used multi-threading friendly libs or not this can make the difference.
 
tuxon86 said:
In my experience, only on system where you can control on which core to run an app do you benefit from this. The OS bultin load balancing is pretty much a crapshoot and more often then not you end up with many processes on core #1 and just about nothing on the other cores.
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I don't think that you understand how process scheduling on a multicore/multiCPU system works. There is a single CPU queue & at each clock tick for each instruction the process on the top of the queue will be allocated to the next free core. It would be a truly dumb OS to only schedule on one core & neither Windows nor the MACH kernel in OS X are that dumb.
 
tuxon86 said:
Looking at my current process list on Win7 at work, my CPU1 is at 40% while my 7 other core are near or at 0%...
This is annecdotal, but this is what I see on my workstation or my employees one. Of course, if the devs that created those apps running used multi-threading friendly libs or not this can make the difference.
Click to expand...
That's exactly what you should see if you have a single active thread that's using 40% of a core. You most definitely would *not* want to see 5% on all 8 cores.

Here's my Win7 laptop with just some random stuff going on:
CPU.jpg
One thing that shows excellent scheduling here is that the only the odd cores are working - almost nothing is running on the even numbered cores. Perfect.

When a multi-threaded app starts up, I see:
CPU2.jpg
Now it's busy enough to spread out across all of the cores. Also notice that the core clock has almost doubled in speed.
 
AidenShaw said:
That's exactly what you should see if you have a single active thread that's using 40% of a core. You most definitely would *not* want to see 5% on all 8 cores.

Here's my Win7 laptop with just some random stuff going on: View attachment 621392 One thing that shows excellent scheduling here is that the only the odd cores are working - almost nothing is running on the even numbered cores. Perfect.

When a multi-threaded app starts up, I see: View attachment 621393 Now it's busy enough to spread out across all of the cores. Also notice that the core clock has almost doubled in speed.
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Ah but I don't have only one active thread running on a single core. I have many single thread running on that single core with scheduling taking place between them. While I agree that it would be dumb for an OS to start a single process on every core leaving none available when an application wants to use more than one core, it is also a waste of ressources, in my own honest opinion, to use a single one. A balance has to be met somewhere and there are still progress to be made in this field of task scheduling and multi-core management.

In any case this is way OT and I don't want to derail any more.
 
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