Single thread is far more important these days
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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depends on your usage, for gaming single thread is still king, but for tasks like video editing and 3d rendering, multithreading is crucial. everyone has different needs!
Depends on your workload.
For most of what I do with sound, video and textfiles of various formats, single thread is not very relevant.
Occasionally you may want to convert a long audiobook that comes in a single file and audio is generally single threaded. But that is still only a minor inconvenience because it also converts in the hundreds of real time speed on a single core.
And if it was important enough, then it's totally possible to write scripts that divide the file in small portions to distribute amongst workers, exactly like it has been done for video conversion where much more compute is needed and this kind of scenario is more realistic.
Depends on your workload
What about web browsing?
ANYTHING thats sold as new stock nowadays should do the job MORE than fine.
You would think so, but there are some really bad SoCs out there, using only Arm A5x series cores that have no business rendering a website and will give you an authentic early 2010s mobile web browsing experience.
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This is the crux of the issue. People talk about "ST workloads" vs "MT workloads", but the reality is that single-threaded workloads largely do not matter, it's all stuff that, at the very worst, is done after a few seconds. MT performance, on the other hand, can save you hours of productivity depending on what your work is.
We are long past the point where ST performance matters for the "snappiness" of systems. Zen 3, Alder Lake, M1 and newer are all more than perfectly "snappy" in any modern system. Gaming is the last use case where ST matters so long as you have a minimum amount of cores, but for professional use cases there's nothing to even discuss, MT is the only thing that matters.
Good MT performance is contingent on good ST performance. Doesn't really matter how many threads you have if they're slow individually. Which will dig a hole faster -- 64 toddlers with gardening spades, or one excavator?
CAD or at least Solidworks is still really only able to use 1 core
This gets repeated every time, and it's nonsense. SolidWorks is mostly single-threaded, but it's also not a demanding application. Even PCs from a decade ago can handle assembling medium complexity models just fine. The few features that are demanding, like rendering and analysis tools like FEA, are in fact multi-threaded.
And if you actually need model assemblies so complex that single-threaded performance in the base app would become a problem, you'd be running a Quadro card anyway, and CPU performance wouldn't matter.
Source: Industrial designer who worked with SolidWorks, PT Creo and Rhinoceros for a while after uni before transitioning to a different area of design.
Single-core is more important for 99% of normal consumers. Most office productivity apps or web browsers are only lightly threaded.
Also, scaling cores efficiently is hard both in software and in hardware. 10 cores at 1x performance are going to be a lot more efficiently used than 20 cores at 0.5x performance.
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As everyone has mentioned most programmes only work on single cores but what people haven't mentioned it multiple cores allow you to run multiple programmes at the same time without suffering performance issues (from the cpu, memory or disk could bottleneck)
Depends.
Microsoft uses saphire rapids (cpu that got smoked in reviews) couse it has better single core performance for their AI servers. You will find a case for CPU.
For PC depends on your workload. If you are doing normal stuff + gaming just buy this or last gen i5/r5. No need to waste money.
You will have more single and multi thread performance than you need.
Depends on what you are doing but I think as a general do it all the 7800X3D is pretty good, good single-core and multi-core performance. If you want to do some productivity is good at that and it's greaet for gaming on. If you want to do productivity only the Intel i9 is pretty good but the new Threadrippers are even better but if you just want to game the 7800X3D is going to be better for that and it's really efficient in power.
For gaming: single threaded performance is usually better to prioritize.
For everyday use (web browsers, etc): both, but generally prioritize single threaded performance first. Multithreaded performance is usually already more than good enough on modern chips that have fast single threaded performance.
For heavier workflows: multithreaded performance is usually better to prioritize (particularly on workloads that inherently use a lot of threads). Single threaded performance still matters, but most modern CPUs are good enough on this front.
For gaming: single threaded performance is usually better to prioritize.
For everyday use (web browsers, etc): both, but generally prioritize single threaded performance first. Multithreaded performance is usually already more than good enough on modern chips that have fast single threaded performance.
For heavier workflows: multithreaded performance is usually better to prioritize (particularly on workloads that inherently use a lot of threads). Single threaded performance still matters, but most modern CPUs are good enough on this front.
depends on your specific use case and the software you're running. for gaming, single-threaded performance is still key, but for tasks like video editing and rendering, multi-threaded performance is crucial. it all comes down to what you need your CPU to do!
depends on your usage, for gaming single thread is still king, but for tasks like video editing and 3d rendering, multithreading is crucial. everyone has different needs!
depends on your specific use case and the software you're running. for gaming, single-threaded performance is still key, but for tasks like video editing and rendering, multi-threaded performance is crucial. it all comes down to what you need your CPU to do!
Once you reach a certain number of cores (~6-8) it depends on the workload.
Windows/File Explorers/Browsers/Games/General Use are all better off with single thread performance at this amount of cores.
Multimedia/Editing/Rendering/etc are better off with even more cores.
There is a balance between the two which nobody can solidly answer since it varies by use case.
depends on your specific use case and the software you're running. different workloads benefit from different performance metrics.
Once you reach a certain number of cores (~6-8) it depends on the workload.
Windows/File Explorers/Browsers/Games/General Use are all better off with single thread performance at this amount of cores.
Multimedia/Editing/Rendering/etc are better off with even more cores.
There is a balance between the two which nobody can solidly answer since it varies by use case.
depends on your specific use case and the software you're running. different workloads benefit from different performance metrics.
A medium amount of core count with excellent memory cohesion.
A medium amount of core count with excellent memory cohesion.
for me, it really depends on what you're using your PC for. for my music production and video editing, multi-threaded performance is key. but for everyday stuff like web browsing, single-threaded performance matters too. different strokes for different folks, i guess!
I would say few(2-4) core performance is most important.
If your gaming single thread most important
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