I am expecting just the 8 cores. 4 and 6 cores later. There is screen shots of retailers showing there chips and only 3 are shown which kinda does suggest 8 core only. I would say we are looking at a PlayStation 5 before more than 4 cores will be the requirement in gaming. And even then only for likely high resolutions. It's took 10 years to get here and even then 90% of titles do not scale past 4 threads. BF1 is a good example of this in benches a 7600k dominates every chip even at stock once Overclocked that gap widens. A lot of this is cause it can have 4 threads at 5ghz. Amds 4 cores will need to achieve something in the mid 4ghz range to realistically compete with that. 3dmark just uses everything available, it's the best Epeen benchmark for SLI CFX and high core cpus. As it will litterally 100% everything. Pity no game does that or we would be further along on those things is a feeling.
Initial reaction to this post: I raise you my 3.5 MHz Zilog Z80 running with 48KB made by a certain Clive Sinclair, and I was lucky. Edit: Although it was not an IBM-compatible PC.
Forget gaming for a minute. What about real world multi tasking, something windows 8 and 10 are very good at? When I'm using my PC for general day to day tasks I see quite heavy even loads on my CPUs. Especially when running things like Photoshop and so on. I can also run Realbench's stress test and still have a perfectly usable PC. Gaming is probably what I do least on my PC now.
Perfect for you then mate. Its mainly YouTube and gaming duties for mine nowadays. Sent from my UMI_MAX using Tapatalk
And therein lies the rub: my first personal computer, as in the first I personally owned, was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. When it died - ULA failure, unsurprisingly - I replaced it with a Commodore 64C which I still own.
As I said earlier, it's horses for courses. At least it looks like we've got a good option from AMD for those multi-core use cases, even if Intel may remain the best call for single-thread or non-scaling uses.
It is safe to assume that, despite remaining in your possession, it is not your main workstation. We had the same model of Spectrum. Mine too failed, and was replaced with the beefy 128K with integrated cassette deck.
D'you know, I had an idea a while back to do a through-the-ages thing for Hobby Tech where each month I use technology from a particular era to write the column. Figured it might be difficult to convince Ben to let me submit the text via dial-up modem or 6" plotter paper in the post, though...
I think we might see a repeat of what happened with the Q6600, which was the very first attractively-priced quad-core CPU that brought quad-core computing to the enthusiast market. It was cheap and could overclock reasonably well (most getting to around 3.6GHz), but not really necessary -- at the time of its release in 2007, very few mainstream applications were making use of more than two cores, and games typically needed only one. It is a little different now in that multi-threaded apps are commonplace, however for the "average" end user (including gamers) there isn't really a requirement for more processing power than a 7600K or equivalent, and people buying HT-enabled quads do so generally because it's within budget. There'll be a psychological element to it too, of course, and that's why AMD are set to be on the money with the 6-core offerings and perhaps even the low-end 8-core 1700.
My PC these days is strictly a gaming rig, YouTube is through a box that goes to tv rarely turned on besides that. Even general web browsing it's just easier to turn on a tablet. Sad but accurate, probably turned on less than 2hours a day at best.
I found tablets made my arm ache and gave me a stiff neck. I have a fantastic chair so I am far more comfy at my desk. Had a couple of tablets now, just not for me.
Couple of "OMG she went there !" slides. https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_ryzen_marketing_slides_leak/1
Looking good so far. My main concern is the power management side of things, was a absolute pita with FX stuff, if they have got around that it will be a winner by the looks of things.
How many 'normal use' programs can even take advantage of a large number of cores? Photoshop has very few tasks that benefit from more than 4 cores, Excel seems to have very little return above 6, and very diminished above 4. Video encoding an CPU-based image rendering are highly threadable, though outside these two I can't think of many workloads that are highly threadable, but have not already been offloaded to GPGPU for even more performance (and rendering is starting to shift to GPU with renderers like Octane).
In fairness, there is a definite trend towards good multithreading. I know we've been saying that for a while, but we're at a place now where in a lot of new AAA titles, you're at a disadvantage with less than 8 threads. Its no longer one or two specific games - but a number that makes you start to consider the benefits of an i7 for gaming. Was reading this a few days ago
Why didn't they overclock the 7600k in that test or the 6600k. We all know the 7600k can do 4.8 at least.
True, but the stock speed of the 7700k with HT enabled is pretty conclusive, in this game at least. Again in favour of Ryzen, I'd rather have 8 proper cores than 4/8 with HT.
