Question How many CPU cores are needed?

[Ksingh707]

How can I determine the appropriate number of CPU cores needed for various tasks and applications? I would like to understand how CPU core count impacts performance and resource allocation for different activities. Please provide guidance on the following:

1. Basic tasks: What is the recommended number of CPU cores for everyday activities like web browsing, email, and document editing?
2. Multimedia consumption: How many CPU cores are typically required for smooth playback of high-definition videos, streaming content, and audio playback?
3. Office productivity: In terms of using office productivity software like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, what is the ideal number of CPU cores for efficient performance?
4. Content creation: For tasks such as graphic design, photo editing, and video editing, how do CPU cores affect rendering times and overall productivity?
5. Virtualization: When running virtual machines or using virtualization software, how does the number of CPU cores impact the ability to allocate resources and handle multiple instances effectively?
6. Gaming: What is the general guideline for selecting the appropriate number of CPU cores for gaming, taking into consideration the demands of modern game titles and potential multitasking scenarios?
7. Data analysis and simulations: When performing data analysis or running simulations for scientific or engineering purposes, how do CPU cores influence processing speed and computational efficiency?

Additionally, are there any tools, benchmarks, or resources available to assist in evaluating CPU core requirements for specific tasks and applications?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ask ChatGPT, we don't do homework questions here.

 

[bba-tcg]

I like 32 threads for everything.

 

[WelshBloke]

The answer is 4 or as many as you can afford depending on which question.

 

[Ksingh707]

Ask ChatGPT, we don't do homework questions here.

This aint a homework question. How do I know how many cpu cores or threads are needed based on all the different applications and workloads out there to compute? Just trying to get a better understanding.

 

[aigomorla]

This aint a homework question. How do I know how many cpu cores or threads are needed based on all the different applications and workloads out there to compute? Just trying to get a better understanding.

Run all the programs you possibly can with task manager open and under the performance tab you will see CPU:
Then see how many % Utilization is being used.
If your peaking 100% at any given moment, you need more cores.
Taskmanager:
Ctrl+Shift+Esc on keyboard.

The answer is 4 or as many as you can afford depending on which question.

Err what if your Valve and only know how to count to 2?

 

[A///]

Gaming: What is the general guideline for selecting the appropriate number of CPU cores for gaming, taking into consideration the demands of modern game titles and potential multitasking scenarios?

Most diy is for gaming but despite amd leading the pack in what you could say are p cores, I want to say 8 to 10 cores is all you need for now, but who knows about the future. it wasn't long ago 4 cores is all you needed and 6 or 8 was a waste of money. im likely wrong but if there's no financial incentive for a game design company to make a game that scales up to 16 or 24 cores they won't do it. we've seen time again how poorly designed games get pushed and then a 1 to 2 year update cycle to make them playable. until then it's safe to play the middle ground. I think most diy is going for midrange models rather than budget or high end.

 

[aigomorla]

amd leading the pack in what you could say are p cores

Why you got to bring out p and e cores...
now your gonna confuse him even more.

AMD doesn't even have P or E cores, they have just cores and even more cores.
And there really isnt an answer to his questions because we have no clue on his computer habits.

You could do well with the valve mentality and have only 2.
2 cores could run everything especially if its programed poorly with horrible parallel coding.
Chrome tabs could use 1 + (X) as many as you can throw at with cores with how many tabs are open and what those tabs have that are open along with what extensions are being used on those tabs.

Virtualization can be answered with π.
How many cores do you need? How many decimal points does π go out to.

You really can not generalize questions like this.
Its down to just Open Task Manager, and see if your Performance tab CPU is spiking 100%.
If it is, the answer is just YES.
Do you need more cores.. YES.
How many more cores? YES.

 

[gdansk]

No one needs more than 1 really fast core. Say an M2 at 500GHz.
Unfortunately there is no (known) method to construct such a CPU.

 

[A///]

Why you got to bring out p and e cores...

because the last time i used the term full cores people were up in arms about me not using the correct term. can't win either way. back to my syrah.

 

[burninatortech4]

These seem like homework questions but I'll bite. I'd say, in 2023 (for home PC's and workstations):

4 cores (w/ SMT) for basically everything multimedia/website/basic productivity.
8 cores (w/ SMT) for modern games and real work (editing photos, video, statistics (R))
16/32 cores (or more - basically the sky is the limit) for data analysis and virtualization (if this isn't happening on the GPU)

 

[yottabit]

Even among scientific applications that you’d think may show great core scaling, there’s plenty of other places to hit bottlenecks.

Many are tied to memory bandwidth, so you may think of it as “cores per memory channel” and this is also why you see such dramatic improvement with the V Cache Epyc CPU under certain scientific benchmarks, since the cache can alleviate the memory bandwidth problems

It’s also why supercomputing chips like the MI300 are featuring HBM integrated on chip

Other applications may be I/O bound at least for phases of the analysis

Because of bottlenecks I disagree that using Task Manager is a reliable check. If I assign a simulation to use 32 cores Task Manager will generally show 100% or near 100% utilization, and the solution time may be equivalent or slower than assigning the number of cores I can actually keep fed without bottleneck

Professional scientific and engineering software is often licensed with some per-core scheme so picking out this point of dimensioning returns (often called “strong scaling” limit) is crucial

So unfortunately the answer is “benchmarking” and it depends, often not only just on application but the specific workload/project/file in question.

Another reason Task Manager is useless is it doesn’t differentiate between regular instructions and specialized SIMD instructions like AVX, I find a better indicator of how effectively the CPU is being used is total power draw and core frequencies over time

For games the reason 8 core is so recommended is simply because that is what the current gen of consoles are using, and most games are designed console-first. Dual/Quad core was sufficient for PS3/Xbox 360 gen because those used a ~3 core architecture

 

[DrMrLordX]

The simple answer: get at least 8 cores on a modern chip (if Intel, try to get at least 8 p cores). There you go.

 

[Tech Junky]

It really all comes down to how fast you want to do things. More cores means less waiting.

1. Basic tasks: What is the recommended number of CPU cores for everyday activities like web browsing, email, and document editing? - 1
2. Multimedia consumption: How many CPU cores are typically required for smooth playback of high-definition videos, streaming content, and audio playback? - 1
3. Office productivity: In terms of using office productivity software like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, what is the ideal number of CPU cores for efficient performance? - 1
4. Content creation: For tasks such as graphic design, photo editing, and video editing, how do CPU cores affect rendering times and overall productivity? - 1
5. Virtualization: When running virtual machines or using virtualization software, how does the number of CPU cores impact the ability to allocate resources and handle multiple instances effectively? - depends on how you virtualize things. If it's bare metal less are needed but, within an OS using something like VMW you'll need more to support the underlying OS + each VM
6. Gaming: What is the general guideline for selecting the appropriate number of CPU cores for gaming, taking into consideration the demands of modern game titles and potential multitasking scenarios? - 1 / depends on the requirements for the title though
7. Data analysis and simulations: When performing data analysis or running simulations for scientific or engineering purposes, how do CPU cores influence processing speed and computational efficiency? - 1

The base / floor at this point for performance seems to be 6+ depending on the CPU AMD vs Intel. Offloading things to the GPU though helps with some things. Games tend to load to the GPU and then run wholly from there and don't push cores that much. If it's high calculations / processing then a GPU would handle things better as you can see for instance from crypto mining. CPU use though varies depending on the coding preferences of how to process things.

If you want to use a bunch of VM's you're limited to your core count because each instance needs at least 1 per VM. If you don't mind it being slow then allocate 1-2 cores per VM. This is where you want higher core counts and move to a different CPU option than a consumer based CPU.

 

[aigomorla]

For games the reason 8 core is so recommended is simply because that is what the current gen of consoles are using, and most games are designed console-first. Dual/Quad core was sufficient for PS3/Xbox 360 gen because those used a ~3 core architecture

no...

This is what you hope and think...
But in actuality its not, because EVERY SINGLE CONSOLE PORT we got this year has been a buggy mess of cesspool and poor programing. Consoles cheat by having shared fast memory.
And dont get me started on GDDR vs DDR vs HBM which in itself is a whole other can of worms.

But the OP is asking specifically about core count.

Again the answer to this question is completely variable and totally on how the owner is with his/her PC habits.

If your using special software which have hard caps on cores, like for example handbrake, 6 physical cores is actually too much. But if your still CPU encoding and not GPU encoding, well, i have no comment. Because Handbrake again can use all the CUDA cores on a NVEC card, yet can only use 4-5 cores on a CPU.

Cores are not equal.
AMD has a core... and even more core.. and lets add even more multi core with Infiniti Fabric.
Intel has a lets go eco mode with E Cores... and a Sports button, with P cores.
Arm and GPU's has "lets Zergling rush the hell out of this" approach with cores.

 

[Keljian]

Wow I’m amazed.

Gaming: 6-8 cores, most games will use 6 cores, having 2 extra means background tasks will not eat into your gaming.

Media consumption: (any number) many processors and graphics cards have encoders/decoder hardware on board, you don’t need a fast chip for this.

Material analysis/simulations: more cores are better. Some software uses graphics chips

CFD: graphics (compute) cards with lots of memory, cpu is nearly irrelevant

Programming: more cores is better, fewer faster cores are better than lots of slower cores

Graphics design, specifically rendering, CAD: more cores is better, memory is important

Virtual machines: 2 real cores, average, per virtual machine that does anything important.

Office productivity: 4 cores minimum, 6 is nice.

 

[mikeymikec]

@Ksingh707

You're asking a question like, "I want to travel, which vehicle is the right one?". It's a horses for courses question and is also highly dependent on budget and a number of other factors, such as the primary user's personal standards of how fast they want things to work.

If you give us some basis for your questions, you might get more useful answers. Why are you asking, for example are you considering building/buying a new computer but you don't know much about computer hardware? Do you have a computer already, how well does it work for you, etc.

One of my customers is still using a computer I built for them in 2009: Athlon 64 X2 AM2, dual-core CPU, 4GB RAM I think, SSD, Windows 10. Another customer is using a single-core socket 754 Athlon 64 HDD-booting Win7 system that was built in 2003/2004. Neither of these customers are complaining about performance. Another customer was wanting to know if I could speed up their i7-6700K + 32GB RAM + decent SSD system in terms of OS startup performance. I'm making do with a Haswell-era system and if I'm completely honest with myself, I have no compelling reason to upgrade it right now, yet if other users here were confronted with it, they'd probably say it's well overdue for an upgrade.

There is no definitive answer to "how many processor cores for task X". You can do all of the things you described on a single core socket 754 Athlon 64 from 2003 (or whichever bare-minimum processor meets the system requirements of the software you're using). The question is do you want it to work faster and how much are you willing to pay. Web browsing for example benefits highly from more processor cores (and not all cores are created equal), but there'll be a curve of diminishing returns based on the rest of the system, the speed of the Internet connection and what the user wants to browse. Office apps don't generally benefit greatly from more processor performance, especially given that most users barely scrape the surface of what modern office programs are capable of.

 

[CP5670]

For games it's generally 6-8. The vast majority of games load down one or two threads and use the others occasionally. Very few games benefit from more than 8 cores.