From Microsoft - Windows 10 supports a maximum of two physical CPUs, but the number of logical processors or cores varies based on the processor architecture. A maximum of 32 cores is supported in 32-bit versions of Windows 8, whereas up to 256 cores are supported in the 64-bit versions.
Can i...
Thanks for your reply. What I was aiming at is that the likes of the i9 and Threadripper seem to be marketed towards gamers, but are people just buying the most expensive processors not knowing that it won't really make much difference when it comes to gaming.
@PaulAlexander Some people want to be on the bleeding edge. If that CPU gives them a few percentage points increase in performance, then the extremely high cost is worth it to them.
@PaulAlexander Not really. AMD has had more cores for years, yet Intel was the CPU of choice only because of higher single-core performance. Only the recent advancement in core performance by AMD brought gamers within their reach.
@spikey_richie depending on the project enough ram to keep all the cores loaded could end up being as expensive as the CPU itself. ex Einstein@Home's recent gravitational wave tasks have taken ~3/4ths of a GB each. I don't recall the exact amount (and can't readily check - they haven't been available for the last month and a half of so) but ran into not enough ram problems on a quadcore i7 with only 6 GB of ram the last time the project increased ram use for faster and/or more precise calculations.
Another easy way to utilize them is to open 32 CPU-Intensive Browser windows - and you will feel the benefit of multiple cores (if you have enough RAM)
On the diminishing returns. the issue is that only fairly recently has multi core has become mainstream, so not many programs may use more than one or a few threads. Its the cores frequency and IPC (instructions-per-clock) that matters more - i.e. a few faster cores may still be better than many 'slower' cores. @Falco browsers I think are still slightly limited on thread count, but RAM is definitely the limit xD
@Wilf If you open your windows TaskManager you can see e.g. chrome having a process for each browser-tab. Each of this processes will be assigned a core by the windows task scheduler. So your browser will automatically use all available cores with enough tabs.
@PaulAlexander but are people just buying the most expensive processors not knowing that it won't really make much difference when it comes to gaming. Some, yes. Also, many pre-built gaming computers will have top of the line CPUs with sub-par GPUs, which is unfortunate.
On my gaming PC, the CPU is usually the bottleneck. It's not that "no games come close to using that much CPU", it's that most games aren't multi-threaded (and even when they are, it's usually only 2-3 threads), so they don't make use of the multiple cores.
Anecdote: having done game-development, I can tell you that most these-days are optimized for 4-8 cores, not much more. Why? That's what the target gamers have. Even AAA-games like Battlefield 4 don't need more than 8 cores. So the question is: what else are you doing with your PC? If nothing, then get a high-speed 8-core CPU instead of a low-speed 16-core one.
@DanNeely To expand on that too, the more RAM you need for a problem, then logically, the more memory bandwidth you tend to need too. A lot of scientific applications are memory-bound, so they run best on multiple quad-channel sockets to maximize memory bandwidth per core.
Am I reading correctly that Windows 8 supports more cores than Windows 10? That seems odd; usually more recent software releases are more capable than older ones, rather than less.
@JeremyFriesner: Please note that a physical CPU isn't the same thing as a CPU core. Almost every PC has a single physical CPU (for instance, an Intel Core i7), but most of these have more than a single core.
@LightnessRacesinOrbit Yes? The vast majority of games are either single threaded or extremely heavy on a single thread whilst splitting some work load across a couple of other threads. Single thread performance has always been king in gaming.
Crysis for example still brings modern PCs to their knees when you start turning up all the settings. It was of course unfortunate enough to have been developed at the end of the period where it was envisioned that the future was faster and faster cores, and so has a very limited threadcount.
@LightnessRacesinOrbit: You have to remember that, until the advent of Metal/Direct3D12/Vulkan (which was really only 3-4 years ago), graphical rendering was essentially single-threaded. You could do some things in other threads, but your rendering performance was going to be dominated by the rendering thread's performance. So until the advent of those APIs, there just wasn't much to be gained from broad threading in games. The bottleneck was always graphics, and while threading AI/etc would help move some things out of the way of the rendering thread, that was always what limited you.
@NicolBolas Meh. Just because one thing is a bottleneck doesn't mean everything else has to share its thread; in fact, quite the opposite, no? You can get all the networking, physics, music/sound, input done while the rendering is happening, no?
@LightnessRacesinOrbit: That's one of the reasons for the recent rise of open-world games: to give other CPU threads something to do. You'd be surprised how little time it takes to do "everything else" in a lot of cases, especially with modern data-oriented design. Remember: the Unreal Engine 1 was able to use a scripting language to define much of its game logic, and it was running on single-core machines. Game logic is usually not very expensive. Also, AI logic can be difficult to multi-thread, since it often requires coordination between entities. So one extra thread was enough.
Discussion on answer by Keltari: Can …
Discussion on answer by Keltari: Can …