Core 2 Or Quad?

[staffsMike]

Depends what you use them for.

For expensive programs designed workstations (3D rendering etc..) then yeah the more cores the better.

But in the home and office environement right now there would be fairly little use for 8 cores are 4 does a great job of most tasks you can throw at them to the point where RAM would be more of a limiting factor than processing power.

[Fraz]

But in the home and office environement right now there would be fairly little use for 8 cores are 4 does a great job of most tasks you can throw at them to the point where RAM would be more of a limiting factor than processing power.

For your average office monkey pretty much any modern computer is total overkill. My laptop from 8-odd years ago was a Pentium-2 233MHz, and I remember quite happily playing mp3s, internetting, writing large documents and processing some huge spreadsheets with some hardcore macros during my physics degree.

I'm pretty sure that nowadays when I'm using my computer, 98% of it's processing time is running world community grid jobs, with the other 2% doing nearly everything else I need. Obviously, there are usage spikes for what I'm doing now and again, but what I'm saying is essentially true. It's crazy how much CPU power people have on tap these days, and I think it's almost a crime to have a computer that isn't doing some kind of background science task to mop up the unused cycles.

But... for other things, definitely the more cores the better. The HPC that's just being installed where I work essentially got an upgrade from ~2000 cores to ~4000 when delays pushed back its completion date past the release of the AMD quads. I'm sure we'll find a use for them all, especially when the Large Hadron Collider switches on

[staffsMike]

My most demanding uses are games and video encoding which struggle together or if you assign one core each the the video encoding takes bloomin ages.

Some will find it useful.. other won't..

[themaidenmaniac]

Ive never done any research on assigning cores to undertake different tasks, is this something specific with intels? (AMD user here, until i switch to the intel quad in a few weeks yippee!).

[depresion]

Ive never done any research on assigning cores to undertake different tasks, is this something specific with intels? (AMD user here, until i switch to the intel quad in a few weeks yippee!).

No you can do it with AMD through taskmanager in XP, Right click on a process and "set affinity".

[acrobat]

erm well he was advising other people,

errrm well, all he actually said was, "C2D's are fine but if you can afford the quad go for it". Whats wrong with that? C2D's ARE fine.

and he was so convincing I felt like going out and spending £160 and going quad..............................

Errrrrm well if you are that easily swayed, I don't think the internet is a very safe place for you.

Is there any point in Intel or AMD producing 8 cores.

Errrrm well if you know enough to argue with what he said so far, theres no point us passing any more opinions. It wouldn't be safe either would it?! You might rush out and buy fifty 8 core CPUs because somebody was too convincing.

No you can do it with AMD through taskmanager in XP, Right click on a process and "set affinity".

can do that with the intels too. I do that for a few old games which go ape otherwise.

[excalibur2]

****errrm well, all he actually said was, "C2D's are fine but if you can afford the quad go for it". Whats wrong with that? C2D's ARE fine.***

Nice bit jounalism or a politicians reply in mis-quoting a sentence, please quote in full................wait I will do it for you.

"C2D's are fine but if you can afford the quad go for it. With 2 - 4gb of ram you can multi task like you've never before"

Ah! Multi-tasking Nirvana...I want it.