The Next Efficancy Debacle

[Simon]

I think one of the biggest growing inneficiencies is computer processors. Why are we being sold 4-8 core processors when the average user only needs 2 ? (I turned two of my 4 cores off and got better performance). Yea marketing wank. At work they tell me i should not meddle with things and that I "break" things, but I'm the idiot in the office that is running 2 processor cores when evereyone else is running 4 cores split into  2 logicals so that their CAD software gets to use just 12.5% of the processor and possibly RAM bandwidth. I went against the trend and have the same machine performing faster. The only thing needing multiple cores is software specially designed for it. But theose "morally bankrupt" engineers that work for the proccessor makers are forcing us to use products that need more power and can in many cases perform more poorly. Progress is such a wonderful thing. So maybe we need legislation about how many cores you can have in a processor, or perhaps engineering companies can "engineer" true solutions instead of only worrying about the bottom line.

[AF6LJ]

I think one of the biggest growing inneficiencies is computer processors. Why are we being sold 4-8 core processors when the average user only needs 2 ? (I turned two of my 4 cores off and got better performance). Yea marketing wank. At work they tell me i should not meddle with things and that I "break" things, but I'm the idiot in the office that is running 2 processor cores when evereyone else is running 4 cores split into  2 logicals so that their CAD software gets to use just 12.5% of the processor and possibly RAM bandwidth. I went against the trend and have the same machine performing faster. The only thing needing multiple cores is software specially designed for it. But theose "morally bankrupt" engineers that work for the proccessor makers are forcing us to use products that need more power and can in many cases perform more poorly. Progress is such a wonderful thing. So maybe we need legislation about how many cores you can have in a processor, or perhaps engineering companies can "engineer" true solutions instead of only worrying about the bottom line.

Well...
I am most likely in the minority, that would be a reduction in performance for me.
When I am playing my online game.....
I am streaming audio from another program, downloading email at regular intervals (MS Outlook is always open), and I may also have a browser running. Now I can do that and not suffer performance degradation
Sometimes I even have my DTP program open and stuff printing...
I like to multitask, after all computers are suppose to improve our productivity, and if I need to take a gaming break to relieve stress or do a brain flush to get the creative juices flowing again...
So be it.

[tom66]

My Panasonic plasma tries to turn the screen off on the Freeview radio channels. Unfortunately, a software bug (perhaps stupid design choice) leads to a single long horizontal line being drawn at 100% white for the top most row of pixels on the 1080 line screen.  Because of this, the panel sustainer stays active and the panel is sustained for 10 subfields at 600Hz - consuming about 75 watts idle.

It's a shame really because on pitch black screens the whole TV consumes less than 15 watts by cutting out the sustain and address fields it doesn't need, pretty impressive given the processor and panel priming (dark panel glow) are still active, 215V and 55V SMPS etc.

[jwm_]

I think one of the biggest growing inneficiencies is computer processors. Why are we being sold 4-8 core processors when the average user only needs 2 ? (I turned two of my 4 cores off and got better performance). Yea marketing wank. At work they tell me i should not meddle with things and that I "break" things, but I'm the idiot in the office that is running 2 processor cores when evereyone else is running 4 cores split into  2 logicals so that their CAD software gets to use just 12.5% of the processor and possibly RAM bandwidth. I went against the trend and have the same machine performing faster. The only thing needing multiple cores is software specially designed for it. But theose "morally bankrupt" engineers that work for the proccessor makers are forcing us to use products that need more power and can in many cases perform more poorly. Progress is such a wonderful thing. So maybe we need legislation about how many cores you can have in a processor, or perhaps engineering companies can "engineer" true solutions instead of only worrying about the bottom line.

Wait, what? who in the world is forcing you to buy 8 core machines? My desktop has one core and works fantastically.

My laptop has more, but it's not because i want more cores or speed, its because modern CPU energy efficiency is obscenely better than it was not too many years ago and a big part of that is due to multi-core dies. My last thinkpad idled at 25 Watts, my current one is several times faster and idles at 9 watts.

And the processor makers, or more cores are not making things slower, it's bloated software. Use an operating system written by people that actually care about making each version faster than the last (many distributions of linux for example, because the developers are people like us and we also believe upgrades should come with more speed and efficiency, not less.).

But the main reason more cores are becoming more common is that they maxed out the speed of chips a while ago, faster clock speeds require higher voltages and power consumption goes up with the square of voltage, and higher clock speeds on the CPU don't help much when you couldn't actually get data to the CPU to process that fast requiring much more expensive and technologically problematic external busses.

Intel got burned on this when it had to scrap its whole Pentium IV and Itanium development lines (which were all about clock speed) when their low cost mobile processor at 1.4Ghz (branched off the old pentium pro architecture) trounced their  2.4GHz server CPUs because thermal considerations were becoming the limiting factor in CPU speed. By designing a low energy chip they "accidentally" created a high performing one. It was about then that Intel stopped putting GHz numbers in their marketing materials. more cores means the processing is more distributed on the die which makes for more processing power per watt. It's no consipracy. It's why your phone has 4 cores, because it makes the battery last much much longer than one core running at 4x the speed. Multiple cores are frightfully more efficient, it's probably one of the  biggest recent computing efficiency gains that has been made.

[Simon]

nobody if forcing us to buy multicore processors, but on a 4 core do DO NOT need hyperthreading, that was only any good for their emergency edition in response to the athlon-64 when ram was slow. so hyperthreading just gives each process 1/2 a core for the sake of marketing it as 8 logical cores as most people see the number 8 not the "logical" and don't know wnat it means. I see ebay sellers advertising 4 core 2.5GHz machines as 10GHz 

I have proved it, I get faster ram bandwidth with 2 cores instead of 4 and my software only uses 1 core and I'm never doing more than one intensive task at once so there is another core for the rest. Like I said disabling hyperthreading on my work machine gave my 3D-CAD software twice the proccessor availability, for all it's sofisticated glory the software only uses 1 core.

Unless you are gaming or video encoding over 2 cores is just wasteful. Go on everyone fire up task manager and see how much of that precious processor your actually using..... The AMD design of getting more work done per clock is also more efficient than intels idea of just throwing more uneeded cores at the processor. They outperformed intel years ago on that which is another reson intel dropped their GHz ratings because AMD put them to shame.