Is going quad core worth it?
Well Jeff Atwood has read my mind again and written a great post about going from a dual core to a quad core CPU that makes for fascinating reading.
Link: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000942.html
My Dell Precision 390 can take a Quad core CPU and I have been debating the merits of an upgrade. It currently runs a rather pedestrian sounding Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz.
It would appear I am just not going to benefit from a Quad core CPU upgrade outside a few areas like media encoding or compilation. It’s great that excel 2007 can benefit from more cores, but I doubt anyone outside of science or finance is going to need a Quad core CPU to add up their sums.
In other words my current Dual Core 1.86Ghz is more than capable of handling my everyday needs. I even ran Bioshock on it the other day and it ran fine.
Sure a leap from 1.86Ghz to 2.66Ghz would be nice and an improvement, but even I can’t justify it. The current CPU does a great job. It just doesn’t feel slow.
Anyway check out Jeff’s article if you need to be talked out of a unnecessary CPU upgrade.
Office2007 User Interface
September 5th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Games could benefit from quad cores if developers make use of it. Intel released an impressive demo that used quad cores to perform complex calculations allowing 100’s of missiles to be fired with accurate trajectories, real smoke effects, etc. I only had a dual core so it was quite slow. I need an upgrade.
For 95% of average desktop use a quad core is a waste. The only reason we notice such a massive difference with a dual coreis because Windows can be a CPU hog. The first time I powered on my upgraded desktop (from a single to a dual core) I instantly noticed how quicker it was at booting up and loading apps. And best of all, when a program froze it didn’t make everything freeze with it. All thanks to the dual core.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I think I saw that demo your talking about. Alan Wake I think it was called and very impressive.
Sadly my Precision desktop is in the 95%.
Single core to Dual core is a great boost. All my work machines are Dual.
I do love dual core I had a media encoding task to run on the house home theatre pc. It runs on a AMD 2ghz and wanted 51 mins to run the task, my Dell Precision wanted 11 mins. A Quad Core would take that down to about 6-8mins or so.
I can get to 2.44Ghz Quad CPU for about £150. But my current dual core is just so damn efficient.
Colin