Syfo-Dyas said:
Since I dont really play games on my pc but do alot of video editing
and the like would this pc really be so much better and faster than a
core 2 duo for the above???
In a comparison here, using Cinebench (a "perfect scaling" benchmark),
the i7-980X runs the benchmark 40% faster than a 975X. That means a
1.5x faster processor, runs the benchmark 1.4x faster. And implies
the processor is choking just a little bit.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/1912...nough_intels_core_i7980x_extreme_edition.html
Whether a six core processor would help you, would depend on whether your
video editing application is "perfect scaling" or not. It means detailed
knowledge of your video editing application is needed, to answer the
question. (The kind of knowledge you can never find on the software
company web site.)
You can never really know for sure, what the maximum number of threads
that an application can use. For example, in the pcworld article, it
happens to mention that Cinebench is limited to just 64 threads
So when a processor with 128 virtual cores comes out, Cinebench won't
run any faster than on the 64 virtual core processor.
Many 3D games have an asymmetric loading characteristic. One thread
of execution is dominant, and the other threads are "helper threads"
which may sleep part of the time. Multimedia applications are
the ones with the potential to use the multi-core machine in
a more symmetric fashion, but even then, someone has to write
the software to make that work. Photoshop has the longest history
of doing that, and has run on multiple cores for a long time. And
yet, only half the filters are multithreaded, and the other half are
single threaded. Only half of Photoshop is accelerated in that way.
And that is the limitation of the multi-core approach - not all
software supports a "divide and conquer" re-write. At some point,
there is no additional parallelism that can be extracted.
I discovered the other day, when someone asked a question about
Microsoft Excel, that a recent version of Excel supports operation
on more than one core. But the problem is, the architecture there
is not clean, and there are many exceptions in Excel that cannot
be multithreaded. This is a valiant attempt, but shows what happens
when not every feature of a program is thread-safe. So if someone
asks the question "Will my dual core run Excel twice as fast ?",
the answer is, it depends. Excel has too many "features" for its
own good.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687899.aspx
Paul
