Should we stop our cores from Parking?

[Ketchup]

As usually happens when I Google, I land somewhere unexpected, but not necessarily unpleasant.

In this case, an app that prevents Windows from Core Parking. Some were talking about this last year:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2277495&highlight=parking

I thought that since Windows 8 was more out there than last year, ATI has taken care of its Crossfire jiggles, and Intel has released slightly faster and more power-efficient CPUs, some might take another look at this.

I wouldn't dream of doing this on the laptop, but the desktop might show some benefit, not that it really needs it.

The page I found is here:
http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

Interesting WinRAR graphic they have there. There are just so many variable here though, I don't know how/if one could really calculate a real benefit.

What do you all think? Is there anything to this, or should it be lumped into the junk pile with the other "optimizers" out there?

 

[BrightCandle]

There was a time when everyone was blaming suttering in games to core parking, then it was hyperthreading and now its been tracked down to the GPU and its drivers.

But there was a legitimate concern with Winrar performance where core parking was causing quite a dramatic drop in performance. Very few other applications seemed to suffer from it and as far as I know Winrar tweaked there algorithm and its mostly no longer an issue.

Saying that go and run a benchmark with your system in balanced power mode and then again in high performance and you'll notice a difference. You'll see this difference across a range of applications and while its slight it is there. Core parking is partly to blame, as is the lower power states that cores can get into. The power saving while most of the time doesn't hurt performance much it does hurt it.

 

[Idontcare]

I disabled core parking once I saw it was the source of all my frustrations when trying to maximize performance in applications like LinX and Prime95.

Core parking is a great concept, but it has some weird hangups that can basically prevent a parked core from becoming unparked until you are well past the time of needing it to be unparked.

My conclusion was that it was one of those ideas that looked awesome and ingenious on paper, but the actual implementation turned out to be rather borked and half-baked.

Like the CnQ that was originally implemented on Phenom (for those who remember it). AMD eventually ironed out the bugs with the PhII, but only by removing some of the key killer features of the original plan (like split voltage planes per core and so forth).

Core parking may someday finally be implemented as planned (like HT), or it may be scaled back like CnQ to eliminate the aggressive aspects that are also the cause of the nuisance issues.

Until then I have core parking disabled on everything, including my laptop.

 

[Ketchup]

The only problem I have with the winrar graph is my own experience. I never remember seeing 100% CPU usage with that program in the first place. I tried it just now on my i7, and it still went up and down, maxing at 80% for about half a second. The compression took about 50 seconds total. Hard drive activity was present, but it wasn't solid. Tried a 32-bit version from last year and the most recent 64-bit.

I suppose if I understood core parking a little better, I might see how it could be a factor here. Maybe I'll have some time this weekend to try it out.

 

[Nec_V20]

The plain and simple thing is that the more cores there are active the more Windows buggers up your game. Most games cannot take advantage of multiple cores so when Windows thinks that your game should be on a different core and switches you get nothing but Cache misses and the game then has to reload the data.

Go ahead, get rid of core parking and screw yourself up even more.

 

[readymix]

I have core parking disabled on everything, including my laptop.

How do you accomplish this trick?

 

[seitur]

For some specific scenarios I can see it may still be a problem, but I would say for almost all userbase and even many enthusiasts benefits of core parking overweight downsides. Of course I hope they will make this tech better as time pass.

 

[Ryun]

The plain and simple thing is that the more cores there are active the more Windows buggers up your game. Most games cannot take advantage of multiple cores so when Windows thinks that your game should be on a different core and switches you get nothing but Cache misses and the game then has to reload the data.

Go ahead, get rid of core parking and screw yourself up even more.

As someone who also has core parking disabled, this is not at all what happens -- at least not on my 2600K.

I also did not see a significant increase in power consumption or heat with it disabled.

 

[Idontcare]

How do you accomplish this trick?

I use the same app that is linked in the OP.

http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

 

[readymix]

thanks

 

[Yuriman]

I believe you can also disable C6 state in bios and get the same effect? I've always had C6 disabled.