- Tuesday, 24 November 2009
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The cows were desperate to be milked, the sheep to be sheared
Core insanity replaces megahurtz madness
TODAY'S SOCIETY is based upon consumption. Linear consumption mostly, where most of the stuff we buy is not recyclable, especially in the electronics sector. This is a fact. There’s nothing much we can do about it, and, in most cases, we don’t even care to do something about it. It’s just the way it is and people think they’re too tiny to make a difference. This is still up for debate. But since this is another huge subject in itself, let’s concentrate a bit on what we really need to consume, to buy and to use. And we’ll be talking here only about the average geek. Let’s ignore the workstation industry, tech websites, hardcore overclockers and obsessed out-of-control gamers. We’ll just focus on people who still haven’t lost their grip on reality, because after all, they’re the only ones who we can argue with. Do we really need quad cores? Do we really need huge monitors, big hard drives, lots of RAM, Skulltrail, SLI and Crossfire? Do we really need to pay so much for an extra 10% of performance which becomes twice as cheap in six months?
Show off
Of course we do. What true geek doesn’t like to show off his spanking new rig
to his friends and to the world? Because, really, most of us do it for showing
off. Some admit it, some don’t. Of course, there are some who have a real
problem with patience and want to play the latest games at maximum settings on a
big, fat 30-inch monitor.
We’re driving these beasts and in this world, a Ferrari is well within our reach. For just 5000 Yuroz you can have your very own geek Enzo, making all your friends drool over the carpet when they visit. Some of these people break new records while some are content with having the best computer in the neighbourhood for a few weeks, until another one decides to join the contest.
Is it wise? Not usually. It is well known that once you reach a certain level of performance, every single step you make in advance costs exponentially more. Things start getting ridiculously expensive once you start trying to exceed, say, 70 per cent of what’s possible with the hardware of a certain period in time.
Quad cores
A very interesting polemic that has the world+dog spewing megabytes of text on
every possible forum and mailing list, concerns the number of cores we need in
our computers. For office computers, the single cores still do well, but
there’s no way any serious machine should have less than two cores today. As a
matter of fact, that’s the exact number of cores which is optimal this year too.
For most applications, a quad core is only as strong as one of its cores. This is because most applications are not designed for multithreading. So you bought a quad. Ok, you got more cores, yes, but who does four active tasks in the same time? Let’s get real. This happens very rarely unless you’re busy with 3D rendering and a few others not-so-common activities.
For most of us, a dual core is still a better option due to the fact that you get more juice out of one of its cores for even less money. This is an advantage for the vast majority of games and applications.
Chances are that for you, 2008 is not the year of the quad core, unless you have money to pointlessly waste. Before rushing in, calm down and think about what you need your CPU to do. If you want to play 1080p video and you just bought a Quad at 2.4 GHz per core but you got a video card without HD decoding, you’re fried when you meet one of those heavily-encoded Matroska movies. You’ll still need to overclock.
Movies, games and most applications, run excellently on a dual core systems with a lot of megahurtz per core. It’ll be at least one more year until a quad core will be a logical choice. It’s all up to the software landscape. Unless a lot of programs start popping multi-core-optimized versions, quad core is a no-go. It is true that the raw power of a quad core squashes any dual core, but if you can’t use it more than five minutes per day, it’s a redundant investment.
Big non HD monitors
We all like a big monitor. We like to see them and we love to own them. But in
the past year, a rather silly trend can be noticed. People start forking out
cash out the window to buy 20, 21 or 22 inches monitors. While these bigger
cousins of your old faithful 19 offer more pixels and a more impressive sight,
there’s one really big flaw in all of them. They’re not full HD. In a few more
years, HD will be seriously popular. You’ll need to buy a 24 then. You’ll be
able to enjoy 1080p straight away and you can have no worries about upgrades for
at least a few years. So think about it before leaving your 19 or 17 for a big
monitor which is already on the road to obsolescence.
The storage rush
How many of us can’t do with a 160 or 320 GB hard drive or a 1 GB flash drive?
The answer is few. The only reason we keep these behemoths around is to keep a
lot of data which we’ll use once a year (at best). The bigger the hard disk is,
the lower the efficiency of its use will be. The truth of the matter is that
collecting pictures, music and movies is part of our every-day life. Yes, it’s
perfectly all right, and yes, we need a lot of storage for that. But isn’t it a
bit tidier to keep things on optical media, nicely catalogued and stored for
later use? Of course, optical support can fail just as magnetic can, but the
difference is that if a 500 GB hard disk dies, you will be in excruciating pain
unless you got some back-ups. If a DVD becomes unreadable, it’s not such a big
deal, compared to the above scenario. As for the expensive huge capacity flash
drives out there, again, we have to wonder if a portable hard drive isn’t a
better option. In most cases, a 256 MB flash drive will do just fine. Remember
the days of the floppy?
SLI and Crossfire
When it comes to big-time waste of money, SLI and Crossfire gloriously take the
cake. From now on, we’ll talk about them as multi GPU solutions, but you should
remember that SLI is even less efficient than Crossfire. For multi GPU, there
really should be no mercy at all. No matter what kind of gamer you are, multi
GPU just doesn’t make sense. Instead of having a little bit of patience, too
many people get in this FPS rush. Yes, it’s fun. Yes, it’s nice to play Crysis
on a huge monitor with no problems. But remember that there are at least a
hundred other games which can keep you busy until a decent single card shows up
which can do exactly the same thing at a fraction of a price.
It’s a waste of money which is caused by the false belief that you get a much higher performance. The much higher performance comes only in certain circumstances, such as very high resolutions and if you’re lucky to have a good new driver and a nicely written game. As all of the benchmarks show, if you have 2 GPUs, you’ll usually end up losing 20% up to 80% of your second GPU’s raw power.
As for the new dual GPU card from Envy-dia, don’t even think about it. Why invest in a PSU that eats more power than an industrial vacuum cleaner and 4 GPUs which in some cases act only slightly better than a single GPU. The technology still lacks efficiency. It’s a driver mess out there, for both Nvidia and DAAMIT. In the case of multi GPU, going for high-end cards is a bloody waste of money which you could easily avoid by having a little patience.
All of this will simply be ignored by people who don’t have something better to do with their cash. But eventually, after a few years, they’ll look how their 3D Mark record-beating systems became mediocre in six months and realize that next time they’d better invest the money into something which won’t lose value faster than a Range Rover flying off a cliff.
Dual CPU systems
We started with CPUs, let’s end with motherboards that cost more than a mediocre
office computer and which offer the enthusiast the ability to gain 10% more
overall performance than a system which is four times cheaper. Obviously that
the raw power of eight cores is unbeatable, we never questioned that. We never
questioned the power of 4 gigabytes of ultra fast RAM or of 4 GPUs. You can have
all that in your rig and you can go to sleep happy that you put all your friends
and neighbours to shame in all the imaginable benchmarks.
But think about how often you'll actually use that power. From a purely honest and statistic-backed point of view, that much power is not used even by the latest games or greediest applications. Pointless.
Again, remember that we’re talking about the average user here, and there is no way in hell that the investment in having an eight core system is justifiable. A simple dual core will do. The decrease in performance is laughable at best. As for all the rest of the applications, including computer programming and photo editing, the same stands true.
Watch your wallets
The press hardly help in all this. Some products which have the same efficiency
as a knitting monkey are promoted and praised for the new records they set,
instead of being thrashed for the power consumption, scalability issues and lack
of supporting software (both drivers and compatible applications). Software
needs to be designed with more cores in mind. That takes time. Games need to
make better use of multiple GPUs. That takes time. Drivers have to get more
efficient and so does the technology (both scalability-wise and power-wise).
That takes time too.
Maybe it's time to just wait. µ
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I think this article will appeal more to older generation gamers. And non-gamers don't even know what their graphics card is *for* for the most part.

Circa 1999, the first thing people looked for in a game was entertainment, challenge, gameplay.

I talk to my nephews about their XBox games. You know what the first thing they talk about *every single time* is?

"That game has awesome graphics."
"Those graphics suck."
"I want to know what the graphics are going to be like!"

That's the reality of today. With such a marketplace, you can see why GFX cards are flying off the shelves, and absolutely turkeys with good visuals still sell well.
Anyone and everyone has multiple threads running on their pc. While not all are active at the same time, some are (just check the task manager). In addition, at work, most have multiple apps running simultanously all consuming cpu time (at the same time).

So multiple cores are a very good advancement just like multiple cpu's. Now we need to increase the actual speed of each core while maintaining realistic thermal working ranges.
I hope you didn't hurt yourself, or anyone else, during that rant...
I'm not the kind of person who upgrades often. Lack of funds, the desire to be a little more ecological, and an "If it works don't fix it" -attitude all contribute.

So when I do upgrade I like to aim for a system which will last as long as possible. For that, a quad core could well be an excellent choice. A dual core is faster than a quad at the moment, but if you're planning to keep your machine for 5+ years that quad core chip can well pay off in the long run. As OSes and software in general become more adapt at using multiple cores the dual vs. quad playing field will probably even out.

Disclaimer: I'm a professional programmer in the A/V media field, and I'm into music making. In other words I'm biased to say the least, but my gut still tells me a quad core solution will be usable for a longer time than a dual if bought even in the near future.
I agree with you to a point.

I agree that it costs a lot to maintain a highend rig and having the latest gizmos and gadgets in ones uber rig is great for bragging rights, but you seem to overlook one crucial point: without those people buying these new technologies and upgrading their rigs so often it eliminates the drive to improve things.

When Multi GPU tech first came out, if no one had purchased it, it would have been a flop and that would have been the end of that.

However, the fact that a number of people did has encouraged futher development and thanks to them R&D will continue into the future, making it cheaper for the mainstream markets. This also means that the wider the adoption, the more developers are likely to take notice and code their games accordingly, with Multi GPU's in mind.

So don't bash the people who buy the cutting edge, you might see it as wasteful, but it drives the industry and encourages growth and makes it cheaper for the masses.

Without them the midrange becomes the "high end" and we take a step back.

Chris
If i had the dosh I would for sure get a 26" 1080p+ monitor a quadcore and 2x 9800gtx.. and maybe 16gb ram just for the hell of it ;)

Btw im not sure that your crossfire is better than SLI argument is valid, have you looked at the numbers for the Geforce 9-series in SLI.
everyone should read this article before upgrading..all the flaws of upgrading horribly exposed!
I have an Athlon XP 2400+ with 512MB RAM running XP Pro quite happily. Its good for surfing, document editing and the occasional UT2004. But thats not my main rig. My main rig is a Quad core, 4GB RAM system which for the last week or so has sat there with all 4 cores running around 90% (encoding video). Now its probably fair to say that probably 90% of the PC using population fall into the category of my 1st PC usage, but thats not to say that anyone over and above that is wrong. I chose quad core purely on the basis that the cost for the same speed Dual core to quad was negligable. I got double the cores, for virtually nothing. Does that make me a fool? I like my system to be fast and responsive, and while I might not have many apps challenging all 4 cores, EVERY system has many many processes running, from AV and firewall, to games and video encoding, playing back audio and video. In fact just running windows with no installed software on 1st boot, will kick off god knows how many processes with god knows how many threads each. So even if not all my games are optimised for >1 core, I get the speed bump because the remaining tasks can be run on the idle 3 while my game takes literally 100% of 1 core. In theory anyways.........
I love the usual articles but this is flat out Brilliant. SO few applications have multi-threading its mind boggling why single-core CPUs have all but died. Multi GPU 'solutions' and the motherboards that enable them cost so much you could buy a Console gaming system and be done with it.

One thing you missed out was 64-bit computing, I mean its been enabled on processors since forever but 64-bit support on home computing is non-existent and why should it be? What home applications uses 4GB+ Memory?

I preferred the megahurts madness but not the rising power consumption issues it brought.

The new efficient dual-cores are great value for money and Video Cards like the 3850/3870 and the 9600GT are both power efficient and wonderfully proficient at delivering a good gaming experience.

Oh well, people will still rush to plunk down $5000US on a system that does the work of a $800US system 80% of the time.
I generally agree with the author and intend to keep the single cores I have for a much longer while. Hey, have I mentioned how awesomely fast WinXP or Win2K3 are on the 3 year old hardware with mere 512 Mb of RAM?!?

However there is one area where all the extra cores are insanely useful, and that is compression of crisp 1080p into a smaller H264 codec. I've seen somewhere that 8 cores get one pretty much real time encoding - nothing to sniff at!

Otherwise "funding terrorism" (as per http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/31/p2p-funds-terrorism ) takes much longer!
It depends a lot on what you do. I'm responsible for the largest publicly-announced factorisation done outside a university (a 547-bit integer), and the sieving step for that is an application for which a quad-core is four times as fast as a single-core. I have two quad-cores on my desk - they're the cheapest way of throwing gigaflops at a parallelisable problem, and I'm a number theorist so almost of my problems are parallelisable.

I'd like to thank the game-players with a sub-optimal grasp of price/performance tradeoffs for making these fantastic compute engines - one quad-core has thrice the performance of the four-processor Alpha 21264 server my university had when I was doing my PhD - available for less than the price of four nights in the worst hotel in Wigan.
Here, One big burden is that within 939/940/775 Pin enviorment, it started as ONE Core. With 4 Cores You should have many more active Pins to Calculate with. EG, Establish Final String & Path.No Extra PINS Mapped, NO Multiple Core Software.. So Far, mainboard is thinking with single core I/O.

NEXT:In 1958 (After My: US Army/US Air Force) I discovered Property of Quartz Crystal in MY Brittany rd Laboratory,(Now with Alliant Tech) its True basic component of Retail Public computing. However, theres Q Factor. Q is rate crystal disentergrates in Use. Your computer falls apart as true frequency Falls off due to useage, So you need to Refresh your computer within its working lifetime, before it falls from working parameters. This makes Public about 40 years behind what we all assume is Hottest technology.EG: SSD with transfer rates of 100 gb/sec Data thru terrabyte/sec transistors or Routing at 340 gb/sec, data flow?~40 gb/sec. These numbers came out in iraqi war from Jap manufacturers. However, it is easy to assume most Telcos & cable units are well above that already.TS.

So USE You Present Equipment IE: http://www.geocities.com/tsvondrashekmd/TOM_AND_JERRY.html Wisely, Its got Short Life expectancy anyway. 

FUN? Think About It. Its'Jerrytime server useses this to credibly recieve some of Presidential $$$ Given Out at This Time by election Board. I Gave 1 Trillion Dollar (US). Paypal wouldn't accept that however. HHHUUUUMMMMM. You Tell Me Whats Wrong?
Thomas Drashek

BTW, I'm Vice Presidential Candidate: TS.
Having upgraded to a quad core CPU (Phenom 9600) I can certainly see your point about how quad core isn't really needed for most things.

I thought all that power would be put to good use with HD video, and sure, it plays but only actually uses no more than about 40% of the CPU power of one core. In fact I don't think I've found anything that uses all 4 cores (I managed to use two cores with Mame).

I certainly can make use of 4GB ram though, leaving lots of stuff running I still find that the system will use as much ram as possible.

I guess though if it wasn't for the fact that it was all cheap I would still be on a single core system with 1GB ram (I got the Phenom 9600 free from AMD on a system builder deal they had, buy a motherboard at £40 and get a free CPU). What cheeses me off is the fact that I can't logically split my machine into machines* (even with Linux it doesn't seem to work too well a dual head Nvidia or ATI video card or two PCI-E cards) so half the power is going to waste.

Rob

*(Yes I know there are packages to do this, but from what I've found, they're proprietory and only work on 32-bit Linux!), and LTSP isn't up to the job of playing HD video.
The problem is that the modern economy is precisely based on customer buying things that they don't need, and upgrading gadgets every other month. We can go back 50 years, when you had a TV or a car for 15/20 years. The other option is comunism, but I guess most people agree that it was a disaster, I know what I'm saying, I'm a british-cuban :)

The fact is, if you stop buying crap, it will be temporary good for your wallet, but the economy will go to the toilet.
I've given up trying to build a future proof pc. The promise of performance gain can't compete with actual performance gain.
So a 3ghz dualcore made sense over a slightly more expensive 2,4ghz quad.
One core sucks. Try running WOW in a window while you are doing work in another. The problem is bad applications designed to monopolize your CPU. Would two CPUs be the solution? I don't know. It surely would be better than getting a faster CPU. Would four CPUs be even better. Considering they cost about $300. Absolutely. Or until software companies start making their applications multi threaded. Then look out. They'll once again monopolize our computers. 

Is there something wrong with buying a 1920x1200 flat panel monitor for in the $300 range. That seems to be the going price at the low end. That's more expensive than a $200 1680x1050 but I'd rather have a few more pixels and not have to worry about upgrading for another 5 to 10 years.

Thom ... your off your meds again !!

We discussed this last time and as your therapist I told you what would happen.

I am ringing your ISP now and throttling you back to dialup speed.

You just can't go around exposing us to these wild ideas of yours ... unless you have the Armadillo helmet on.

Otherwise the aliens thoughts from above interfere with your mind and it all ends up a bit garbled.

I'll speak with them on your behalf but they are still pretty unhappy with the fact that you stole their anal prove last time you broke into their saucer.

The want it back ... or at least the crystal resonator on the end of it.

I still love you little buddy ...

XXX

Somewhat unusually I find myself finding fault with this rant.

I would be a power user. I look forward to having time off but never seem to get it. If I can stop working 5 minutes earlier every day because I have a quad core then I'm all for it. I have a dual core and see no point in upgrading for the sake of 5 minutes but would none the less welcome it if my machine was not less than a year old.

I have not one but two 24" screens which are both more than HD resolutions. I did not buy these because I want to feel good about having HD capabilities, I’ll leave that to all the numpty’s. I have them simply so that I can see more without squinting. Even so, and due only to the high resolution, I know some people would argue the text is too small on my screens. Therefore anyone who got a large but low resolution monitor and is happy. Fair play to them, they got exactly what they wanted without being sold on marketing crap.

Regarding optical media. It costs more for a zillion discs, takes up more space to store a zillion discs, is most likely less recyclable and is without doubt too unreliable to rate as an option. This is from experience and does not take into account all the time spent dealing with issues writing the disks which are many and not limited to path depths and name lengths. 

I would therefore conclude that this article is a real let down for a site that usually succedes in holding on to a great sense of humor. This is probably why this is the first article I deliberatly stopped reading before even getting half way through.
640K ought to be enough for anybody

seriously, 64 bit and 4gb will be the norm in a few years, games won't run without 2 and quad cores will be needed just to run word 2009. Do we need it? yes - it's called progress
I only take issue with the comment on RAM. If you're running any 32-bit OS, then yes, 4GB is a complete waste. But, if you run Vista 64, and you ever play any graphics laden games, or just have a lot of different apps open at once, 4GB should be a minimum.

One might ask here, "Why? The system will just page out to the HD when RAM gets scarce." 

Well, if you want to increase the responsiveness of your system immediately for minimal cost, then turn OFF your paging file. Forcing the system to stick with physical memory.

Firefox is where I immediately noticed a difference here (windows loves to page it out, even when there is plenty of physical RAM available).

Without the paging file, 4GB of RAM is a comfortable fit to do pretty much anything you want with your system and not have to suffer disk thrashing or out-of-memory errors.
I do not upgrade often. Generally my upgrades or purchases coincide with the launch of new OS. This time I bought a new pc with Vista. I'm happy with my setup and am planning to use it till I find a real need to upgrade.

Coming back to the article...
The situation with PC gaming is that the bleeding edge GPU's have sub par drivers and by the time the drivers are fixed a new generation of card arrives. 
My adive would be to stick with a midrange gaming solution. 

My opinion of the CPU scenario...
By the time we see truly quad core stressing software/games for a typical home user, we would probably be seeing much newer CPU's in the market which would be way faster than the current one. This is the sole reason why I resisted going for a quadcore citing no good application/game ( my usage based) to make good use of it.

The problem which I see more often in my country (India) is that people (geeks) who upgrade hardware often are the same ones who do not care to buy a single copy of original software. The same guys would build quadcore htpc's and not buy a single movie disk.
Majority of these people use their cutting edge hardware to pirate the latest. 
...buying a cost inefficient system that hardly ever is used to its full is still worth it in general for one simple reason - the purchase of cutting edge technology by a few (with wide profit margins) pays for it to become mainstream in the next generation.
Like many commenters already said, it depends on what you do. If you're into music or video production you'll easily use all your 4 cores, or all your 16 cores for that matter. Even if you just check your email there's virus protection, this and that that run as separate processes, so why not offload them to a different core for better response. And once the cores are there the software will come through...
I troroughly congrue with brilliant Dr. Drashek...
The start of the art evidently must be behinged 4 years into the past tense. No doubt, arched-nemesis sheik Ibid et al Op Cit is to ultiemately vfault. Just over the horizon, vee vill finally zee un octo-plushy mirage of calculas which will allow us to go forth and reckon. Veni, Vidi, Conger! Woo boggles the mind!
I love theinquirer. You people really talk sense. I totally agree with the author on this one. For the average office applications a single core is definitely enough! Why the hell would you want to run simple office applications like word processors on multiple cores???
Well even for most gamers, a dual core is enough. Coupled with a reasonable graphics card it can really perform very well. 
Quad cores don't really hike up the performance in today's real world applications due to the simple face that these applications haven't been programmed keeping multiple cores in mind. 
And yeah... most people just this stuff for the flaunt value. 
Great Work!!!
I'm using now PIII-1GHz with 512Mb running XP quite well. I have dual AthlonMP 2400+ with 3Gb running XP, Vista and Mandriva when I need it. 
And I'm with 2*4 Xeon Harpertown mnonsters at my job to make video processing happy. 

G-man and ladies, do You really need monsters at home (not for games)? I'd better invest in my newlly bought appartments...
There are issues with the manufacturing processes (eg - where the component materials are sourced from, and how much destructive mining and materials refining was involved), but in terms of usability there simply isn't an excuse for throwing out anything electronic.

If it doesn't work, then donate it to someone who can make use of the electronic parts - chances are all of it is fine, and only something small needs replacing.

If you're just done with it, then donate it to a charity shop, or give it to someone that wants it, or if you're lucky enough to live near enough an electronics recycler / refurbisher - well hand it in there; some of them even do collections.

And they'll take non-working machines for the same reasons as above: chances are whatever's wrong can be fixed pretty easily.
Many send off the machines to third world countries and donate them for other charitable work.

Sometimes the manufacturers themselves have trade-in programmes going (I think Dell do it for free, for example), and a lot of vendors will do trade-ins.

At the end of the day - most folks will be using computers for internet-related entertainment, and for doing office app. work.

The former requires fairly recent hardware if you plan on downloading and storing a lot of media, and using media like video and audio; you of course also need a pretty fast internet speed connection.

A LOT of webpages have TONNES of unecessary parts to them, and all they do is clog up computers and slow them down. Even if you know how to be selective* about cookies and ad's, just visiting most sites means (temporarily*) downloading loads of stuff you never use nor need, per each page.

And for office work - well even Windows 3.1 still works fine there.

No excuses for throwing out electronics and electrical parts. 

Personally, I'm into building the fastest most powerful-possible systems, with a view to putting them online for various endeavors (distributed, as servers, proxies, etc); and I think as long as anyone who does keep up to date with hardware releases sells or otherwise recycles their old parts (or keeps them!) then there's only the manufacturing issues to sort out as regards being eco-sensible (and the power supplies & source).

Picture say in a couple of years time max, you're finding quad cores on sale well cheap - because their previous owners are now using 8 or 10 cores.
"How many of us can’t do with a 160 or 320 GB hard drive or a 1 GB flash drive? The answer is few. The only reason we keep these behemoths around is to keep a lot of data which we’ll use once a year (at best)."

Hey, some of us like a little variety in our, um, one-handed viewing.
I run a core duo e6700 at work and a P4 3.06 at home. I really do not see to much difference in everyday use. 

I recently added an AMD ATI HD3850 agp card to my P4 and get 30fps at 1200x1600 playing Call of Duty 4 with 4x anitaliasing on. 

I think the P4 with hyperthreading (2 cores) is plenty, the core duo adds a little comparatively.
as one of the above-mentioned losers, i should point out that some of us enjoy building and upgrading computers. we don't become heartbroken when something newer and better is released. on the contrary; we get excited because we get to buy a new toy.

car tuners basically do the same thing computer geeks do, but at least the general public understands why. they don't need to spend thousands of dollars to add a few extra horsepower (that they don't need), but they enjoy doing it. building the toy is half the fun.

geeks like myself aren't being taken advantage of by the marketing campaigns of electronics companies. i build and tune monster rigs because i enjoy building and testing them.
What a wimp...Ahh, nothing like applying the logic that just because the applications I use aren't threaded for quad-core, everyone's else's usage models must be the same right? It's just like the idiots who think a modern corporation can actually run on medicore office software. Hey, you want to compensate me for the time I would waste encoding videos and editing videos using a single-core Pentium 4?
Excel 2007 is multi-threaded.

My models that used to take an hour to calculate now take 'only' 15 minutes, and the ones that took 10 minutes now take a mere 150 seconds.

Awesome, bring on more cores please.
My main rig is a six-year old DP PowerMac G4. It's pretty well maxed out in terms of hardware and running a modern OS, and I'm very happy with it.

I had built up a monster quad-core system that was indeed the envy of my friends, but for the stuff I normally do it was no faster- one can only check their email so fast, you know.

One day a co-worker made me an offer I could not refuse on the Quadfather, and I went back to the old G4, and quite frankly I'm not sad over it.

That said, the G4 will never run Oblivion at 100+ FPS (indeed, it hardly runs Diablo II without occasional slowdowns), but for web, programming, email, Photoshopping and video editing with FCE, I could not do much better.
Maybe its' Child you kidnapped, then sold at convention via photos & then had pictured on theinquirers' sidebar week ago ( notice how hair has been shaved off on side of face), yet just doodling your Spouse isn't that Big of Deal. 

Speaking of Your Meds....Why is it I feel you have sickie way of threating people because person is smarter than you.PS the comment server cut post up, you cut kid up & you cut us all up, So cut you up for REASSEMBLY ON next Holiday.
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.
I Feco that some extra depth is needed. Extra pins mean additional instruction sets, those yet unknown instruction sets are created by mapping activeity of multiple cores. First software is written to enabled additional cores potential, then additional pins are added as hardware to service those instructions & THEN Multi core programing can begin. As it is establish instruction set locked into each core of CPU Hardware, So until additional instruction sets are mapped & converted into core hardware itself, with all new chipsets to support that complexity, multi core is merely in being built stage.True multicore will be all differnt on inside, due to new hardware taking on new instruction sets.
So four core runs more crash free at present, yet not actually more complexly.

On Quartz frequency, inside computer there is starting point for frequency, it is done by applying Voltage to Quartz Crystal, which produces frequency, Then that frequency is multiplied by its paths of timed inter spaceing & combined into final exact frequency of CPU & other controllers.
It can be amplified or decreased in Amperage.What I was doing was testing items for natural frequency,in1958/59 most have little or no frequency & of great variance/unstable, I had collected Quartz samples Locally & tested one, I was astonished as to exactness of frequency & repeatability, reporting it to capt von drashek md. .So from Control Data,Edina,Mn, to here its been few islands of learning for myself. However, I feel personal degradations by others, whom have NO Right To Pose as Advocates for Myself,are embarressment to all commenters.
If you want to speak to good people that way, go out in back alleyway, where you belong.
Thomas Drashek
Okay, help me out here. I've played with Dual & Quad CORE machines, and they're nice, but I've noticed that my two tear old 3.4/P4 HyperThreading laptop with 2GB runs my Media Center Xp about the same. Movies? The same. Rendering? The same. Now, feature THIS. I have an older box I use as a media server that had a 1.80E P4 in it with 1.5GB of RDRAM (yeah, RDRAM-Read $$$). Any way, it was doing an okay job but one day last week, whilst trolling eBay, I came across a 2.4GHz (that's as fast a chip as the 850e chipset supports) for $20 and I went for it. Well, guess what? In real world usage, my 2.4GHz/1.5GB RDRAM keeps up with and in some cases, OUT PERFORMS my 3/4GHz/2GB laptop. So, what have we learned...? That a REALLY, REALLY fast memory technology, regardless of hold old, or how expensive and propiatary, makes all the difference, Not HyperThreads, Not cores, just good old fasion fast as a scalded cat memory! (Really fast drives don't hurt either.)
Most peoples' workloads are I/O bound. That is, the process that they're performing literally cannot go any faster because it's waiting for data from an I/O device, whether that's the hard disk (most common) or a CD drive, the network, or just more input from the user.

Increasing CPU speed doesn't improve the overall performance one iota. Adding more cores doesn't help either. There's no point multithreading most programs as the compute time is below the human response threshold, *if* the data it needs to work on is already in RAM. If it's not already in RAM you're waiting for the disk. Traditional server sizing said you should consider the CPUs a bottleneck if overall CPU usage stayed over 80% with longish queue lengths for a long period of time. Most PCs with even a single core run at under 5% when web browsing and word processing. These systems won't benefit from dual core, let alone quad.

Here's the rub. Disks aren't getting any quicker. Bigger, yes. Quicker, no. The time taken to retrieve data from the disk is dominated by the time to move the read/write head into the correct position (seek time). For a 3.5" disk this is about 8ms. It's been about 8ms for years. In fact it's got a little slower as the head has to be positioned with ever greater accuracy, as the density of bits on the disk increases and distance between tracks decreases. Then the drive has to wait for the disk to rotate until the first byte to read is under the head - this is proportional to the spindle speed, so on average a 10k rpm drive will have a lower time-to-first-byte than a 7,200 rpm drive. A faster spindle speed will then give better 'burst' bandwidth, but most I/Os are pretty small and the bandwidth just isn't sustained. As data sets get bigger, the properties of disks mean that working on them is just going to take longer and longer.

Flash - for "solid state disks" - has much lower latency (time to first byte) but burst bandwidth is much lower, particularly for writes, so you have a trade-off between small I/Os completing quickly and large ones taking much longer. Right now magnetic rotational storage wins for most applications.
Where multiple cores pay off is on servers where you can have many simultaneous processes. A lot of desktops run fewer than 100 processes. On my terminal server with 20 students, I may have 700 processes running on one core. Dual and quad core processors are remarkably efficient in this case. Thin clients use very little power and show the pix and send the clicks to and from the terminal server which runs hard and uses a moderate amount of power. This way for the cost of one good desktop, I can keep many running.

see k12ltsp.org , ltsp.org
If you're a real hardcore geek, you're running linux which takes and uses 4 cores happily. 

Regarding disk, it's cheap. I'd rather have a 500 GB disk and a 500GB backup disk than to have to organize physical objects! I can fill a DVD with 3 outings with my still camera (about 2 weeks), or 45 minutes of video from my digital video camera. A 256MB flash drive holds about 3 minutes of video. 

For normal office use, all of this is indeed overkill. I happily use a laptop with a 20GB drive and one processor core. For most people in the workplace being efficient with data storage is a waste of time. Spending hours poring over a hard drive to free up space is more expensive than having bought a bigger hard drive to begin with, or adding a drive.
We also need software that has more common sense, take wordpad for example... try loading a dvd iso with it and watch the system choke itself, it doesn't take a lot of dev effort to cache only a few pages of data at any one time... and yet there it is.

If they made apps the way they make kernels, it would be a much better place. (Peter Principle in full effect)
Just like a meat commercial, you can taste the difference quality makes. LOL

The avg joe doesn't encounter anything worthy of more than 2 cores, games are the only exception. 
There will always be edge cases (like spell checking a 500pg word doc). 

However for power users, ones who manipulate anything relating audio, 3d and video then yeah, even 4 is not enough (more the better) this is where threaded apps are needed; unfortunately this is where it is lacking the most right now. They would also benefit from 64-bits if data sets are more than 2gb. However their budget is lower than their resource needs, making a sub-optimal market.

Then there is the business sector, not only can they afford the hardware, but optimized in-house software too. 

For example: I work as a senior software dev at a ISP/Telco. Our server has 32 cores and 32gigs of ram running a 64-bit OS and vmware. Our dev boxes are quads with 8gigs of ram. Most of this power goes into subscriber bandwidth tracking and authentication for billing and security, the rest is applied for call center performance tracking, service features, billing reports and system maintenance plans.

Then there is the extreme... math/sci/gov sector, where finding aliens, curing cancer, solving rubics/chess/encryption/PI, nuke sim etc is the thing. For this, no amount of power is enough. Games fall into this category because of real-time AI and physics.
Yeah, ok, open up task manager and you have a bunch of threads running. Then switch to the percentage of your CPU that's being utilized at any given time. If you're like most people, it's 2-3% when idle, with 30% bursts for the occasional second and the rare 100% spike for a fraction of a second.

The fact is that all those threads you see are hardly taking any CPU time and any performance benefit you get by accelerating them with a quad core is a figment of your imagination.
Your rant, while I mostly agree misses it's audience. First you define the audience to be all the people who already think this way. That is, everyone who is most likely to think about "bang for buck." As you've yourself noted, for the HC gamers and for those who need an ego boost through PC hardware (now there's a funny one) you already rule out as hopeless...
Computer monitors are not TVs. SXGA, look it up, educate yourself, and stop being a nwb. 

As for Quad core computers... Just because you work in an office and don't need them doesn't mean people that work in studios don't use them.
If you cant play "heavily encoded matroskas" on your quad, it is the decoder that is to blame for not supporting multithreading. 

A quad gives more processing power for the buck and it is only a matter of time until all video encoders/decoders are SMP enabled. Many already are, for example CoreAVC and some of those by Cyberlink.
We need people to buy state of the art stuff to drive the evolution of technology or we would stuck with lowest common denominator. The sad thing is the planned obsolence (electronic devices of today barely live for 3 years, then you have to buy a new one) I think current generation of LCDs will die within 5 to 10 years max, not like the 25 years tubes from the 80ies.

If you are a patient one then in half year (with the current pace) you can be on the same level with anyone who bought the latest and greatest earlier, and for much less, but you can count him a leader and yourself a follower, and this naming tells the whole story.

I remember the times when CAD cards - with 2D lines! - cost more than a yearly salary, and SGI with the size of a washmachine and the 3D performace of a Nvidia TNT (or less) meant to be the wet dreams of every geeks....
Who is buying cheap 24" full HD monitors today is either will regret it - due to the inferior technology used in those - or would buy an other when quality panels will drop in price. I have changed from an IPS 19" with a contrast of 400:1 to a 20" P-MVA with a 800:1 with wide screen. Both have real 24bit colors and superb viewing angles, not full HD, but none of the current sub 400$ 22 or 24" can match. Currently anything bigger than 20" and matching quality is more than 1000$.

If you just want to buy pixels then my condolences for your eyes :) BTW even premium 17" notebooks can display full HD...
I think the article is true from the begining to the end, but one note should be added: "This is trye for 95% of the people out there; if you are in the 5% that need more from a computer don't burst in flames, use your judgement."
It's probably also the uncertainty of upgrade potential. With AMD changing it's socket twice with no need, it left a few people burned. Seems to make more sense to get the best you can NOW and forget about upgrading the cpu.
I agree with all the points in this article, actually. But it's because I have been subject to upgrade burnout.
I have been building my own PCs since 1989. I have only ever bought one single PC as it was, new. After that, I only ever bought pieces to upgrade it.
Because I am a gamer, and because games need next year's configuration to run well, I used to buy every single new top-of-the-line graphics card and CPU I could lay my hands on.
I used to be capable of upgrading three major components a year (GPU, CPU, mainboard, RAM, you name it I've done it). I even had a hand in watercooling before it became cool to talk about it.
But now I'm tired of it all. Tired of scratching my hands against rough metal casings. Tired of plugging and unplugging all those cables. Tired of going down on all fours like a toddler to check what is wrong in the POST process.
But most of all, I'm fed up with the hassle of reinstalling Windows every time I change the motherboard.
And things have gotten better, it used to be that you had to reinstall Windows if you changed the graphics card. I've done more than 300 Win98 SP2 installs for myself - that does not count the ones I did for friends and family.
So that is why I restrict myself to one major upgrade every 18 months. SLI ? it never worked as advertized, and even in the rare occasions where it does perform better, it still costs waaayyy too much to be justified.
Quad core ? I don't see the issue there. I prefer to have one now and let the apps roll in later. Besides, there are two instances where it is actually useful : dedicated server for Quake 4 - CoD - Battlefield 2 style games, or just Supreme Commander. With my quad core, SC is fully playable at the highest settings. When I just had a dual core, it would stutter in the zooming action. Hey, I'm a gamer, remember ?
Better hardware is a Good Thing when it is financially justified. SLI is not financially justified, Quad Core is.
For the rest, I'll upgrade my PC again when the FSB speeds have reached 2Ghz. Before that, it is not worth the hassle I'll get in reinstalling yet again the OS and all the apps.
Oh, and the penguins can keep their traps shut until my 250+ games (legally purchased with jewel cases AND manual AND serial) run on their OS with the same level of performance (or better).
--[But isn’t it a bit tidier to keep things on optical media, nicely catalogued and stored for later use?]--

No. What's "tidy" about having 100 4.7GB DVDs sitting around instead of a single 500GB HDD that's actually inside your computer?

Oh yeah, and you can't index them easily using Google Desktop Search or whatever either when they're like that. By "catalogued and stored" you're talking about sticky labels and cupboards, on an IT site?