Where do you need more cpu power?

[perdomot]

We keep seeing more and more powerful cpus but aside from synthetic tests and encoding work, where does all that power really show its stuff? I know gaming gets some benefits but what about the typical pc user? I just saw a video with the new i7 cpu running with 12GB of ram and was asking myself where does all that go.

 

[Mistwalker]

Virtualization. People running multiple VMs can potentially use all that and more depending on the function each VM is serving. That's the only non-server related use I can think of, anyway.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

At home and at work...

 

[Duvie]

I need faster IO drives.....I already have a quad core oc'd and cannot find much use for it besides a handful of apps......

I think the cpus are pacing themself to far ahead of the game....software has been lagging behind 5-6 years after hyperthreaded cpus showed the future was going to be multi-threaded....


I rather see advancements in other technologies that are currently bottlenecking the systems and really limiting ourselves to the gains the cpu's show in synthetic test....

Also more hardware seems to be offloading some of the cpu load and doing it itself....vid cards, soundcards, physic cards, etc....I think for the average user most dual cores are overkill let alone quad cores that can handle 8 threads!!!!

 

[perdomot]

I've been looking at the Velociraptor myself since I'm still running a 74GB Raptor and I still remember the difference it made over normal sata drives.

 

[Markfw]

F@H.....

 

[secretanchitman]

stock market trading (fidelity active trader pro), photoshop, video encoding!

but goddammit, i wish i had a faster hard drive...hopefully BF will net me some 32MB cache hard drives for cheap!

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Also going to add to those wanting improved I/O. Media manipulation is pretty obvious and easy for anyone, however once you start throwing around some of these huge files, the slow disc drives can be a pretty big downer. Hardware RAID can go a long way to improve things in that area, but the cost, complexity and headaches really start to balloon to the point where it simply isn't worth it (at least not for me).

 

[AstroGuardian]

Fast, i mean FAST hard drives. More than double of current fastest hard drives and than you will start to see performance improvements with quad core processors aside from encoding, f@h, s@h etc......