Dual Core to Quad Core upgrade..

[Lyion]

I built out my rig last year with a cheap Core 2 Duo processor with the plans of upgrading to a Quad Core one. It has 2 Gigs RAM, 8800 GTX, 2 500G SATA hard drives, etc.

I use it for pretty much everything. Email, Net surfing during the day, gaming at night, with Media Center running in the background, and a few other applications also running.

Currently, the Q6600's are down to 275 dollars on Newegg. Is it worth it to pull the trigger and upgrade to it, or will my returns be negligible? I've done some reading on Toms Hardware and a few sites with the Quad vs Dual arguments, and it's tough to decide.

Thoughts?

[Naethyn]

I have a quad core at work and a dual core at home. I notice no difference working at home compared to work even when running multiple apps such as Visual Studio, SQL, and Photoshop at the same time.

I can't make the same comparison with games as I am unable to install them at work =p

[Tikker]

the only time I ever notice a difference is when i'm doing some sort of very heavy cpu crunching, IE video encoding

P4 1.7 took roughly 12-14 hours to encode a movie
P4 2.4 took roughly 4-5 hours for same thing
Core2 duo chopped that down to just under an hour
Quad core dropped it to something stupid like 19 minutes

for everything else I honestly couldn't tell the difference

I have a hard time stressing the C2Duo enough to even entertain spending money on a quad core

your media center is going to be running everything in hardware on the tuners and/or vid card, so cpu isn't going to be an issue (unless you're doing some hardcore 1080p mpeg4 decoding)

[Tossica]

Waste of money.

[Reynaldo]

Kind of on but off topic.

Why is the E6600 still more expensive than the E6750 Core 2 Duos? From straight specs on both chips, the 6750 looks better in every regard. Maybe I'm missing something obvious...

[Lyion]

Kind of on but off topic.

Why is the E6600 still more expensive than the E6750 Core 2 Duos? From straight specs on both chips, the 6750 looks better in every regard. Maybe I'm missing something obvious...

Manufacturing costs, I think.

I'm going to hold off buying a new CPU, since I can't really justify 300 bucks even though the itch is there to upgrade.

It'd be more there if Vanguard didn't suck and I had a steady WOW or EQ2 group that I played with..

[Lionking]

What % of software currently supports quad core processing, or even dual core for that matter? My guess would be a very low %.

[Tikker]

What % of software currently supports quad core processing, or even dual core for that matter? My guess would be a very low %.

it's not always about multicore processing, but multi function

[Naethyn]

What % of software currently supports quad core processing, or even dual core for that matter? My guess would be a very low %.

It is incredibly easy to use the functionality of multiple core processors in .NET. It's a simple command to create a process on a new thread. Often I have 4+ threads going that que the completion of all to continue processing.

[Darcler]

Kind of on but off topic.

Why is the E6600 still more expensive than the E6750 Core 2 Duos? From straight specs on both chips, the 6750 looks better in every regard. Maybe I'm missing something obvious...

Manufacturing costs, I think.

I'm going to hold off buying a new CPU, since I can't really justify 300 bucks even though the itch is there to upgrade.

It'd be more there if Vanguard didn't suck and I had a steady WOW or EQ2 group that I played with..

Play with Gid and I. We are both around our 50s. Im 51 and he is 47 or so.

[Lyion]

What % of software currently supports quad core processing, or even dual core for that matter? My guess would be a very low %.

It is incredibly easy to use the functionality of multiple core processors in .NET. It's a simple command to create a process on a new thread. Often I have 4+ threads going that que the completion of all to continue processing.

Wow, this is so off I don't know where to start..

Multi threading is not using multiple CPUs or cores.

[Naethyn]

What % of software currently supports quad core processing, or even dual core for that matter? My guess would be a very low %.

It is incredibly easy to use the functionality of multiple core processors in .NET. It's a simple command to create a process on a new thread. Often I have 4+ threads going that que the completion of all to continue processing.

Wow, this is so off I don't know where to start..

Multi threading is not using multiple CPUs or cores.

It's funny you say this. Before I posted my response I went to one of the programming guru's at my work to find out if multi core processors take advantage of multi threaded applications. He told me that is not dependent of the .NET framework, but the OS and the hardware involved. I typed Multi-core into wikipedia and it said this:

Each "core" independently implements optimizations such as superscalar execution, pipelining, and multithreading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_%28computing%29

This leads me to believe multi core processors do in fact handle multi threaded applications. If this is incorrect please clarify.

[Lyion]

The simple answer is threads and symmetric multi processing coding are segregate things.

Coding for threading is not coding for SMP. Threading in most cases is asymmetric. Except in things like Oracle or high end applications, you don't have threads assigned to CPUs, which I think you were insinuating. That is wrong. The OS will try and use all it's resources, but that's different.

SMP server coding is different, since the configuration generally is not one sole system board and the limited resources that the desktop is. PCs benefit from multiple cores and more horsepower, but in most cases PCs are rarely CPU bound, and most applications while being multi threaded are not coded in a good SMP manner.

and... threading and SMP are disparate.

[Naethyn]

The simple answer is threads and symmetric multi processing coding are segregate things.

Coding for threading is not coding for SMP. Threading in most cases is asymmetric. Except in things like Oracle or high end applications, you don't have threads assigned to CPUs, which I think you were insinuating. That is wrong. The OS will try and use all it's resources, but that's different.

SMP server coding is different, since the configuration generally is not one sole system board and the limited resources that the desktop is. PCs benefit from multiple cores and more horsepower, but in most cases PCs are rarely CPU bound, and most applications while being multi threaded are not coded in a good SMP manner.

and... threading and SMP are disparate.

So if I write an application with 2 separate threads on a windows machine with a dual/multi core processor it will not divide the two threads between the processors?

Also, If I declare a thread as asynchronous I was under the impression that it gives higher priority to synchronous threads and it only runs when there is extra processing power available.

Again, if any of this is untrue please clarify. Thx.

[Lyion]

Actually, often it won't.

Let me redirect, counselor.

How would you enable load balanced SMP code from a .NET app for a Windows Application? Multi threading does not always load balance well and is dependent on the host OS. Also, a lot of proc's just do hyperthreading which is not true SMP which adds another equation into your windows multi processor coding picture.

This is a bit old, but a very good read on Windows and SMP.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... alabil.asp

I could see if you were using multi threading from a lower level, but you're talking about .NET and SMP so I'm curious how you'll properly use this outside of the fork approach, which ain't optimal.

Simply put, just creating a multi threaded application does not a good SMP app make. Often times, the opposite is true.