On 1/13/2012 8:40 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Haro de Grauw wrote:
I always thought that more cores is good for doing lots of things simultaneously, [snip]
Yup.
Two questions:
1) For typical desktop use, is it more sensible to buy a six-core 2,5GHz processor, or a dual-core 3,6GHz? In other words, should I prefer more cores, or higher clock speed?
I would go for the latter - for regular desktop use, even a single core is more than enough.
I disagree. For a user machine, as opposed to a server, 2-to-4 cores yield better responsiveness and apparent speed than a faster processor. Even for simple things, becauese Linux is very smart about farming out different tasks to multiple cores so that the whole workload flows more smoothly. Long compute operations will probably be tied to a single core. But screen refreshes need not wait for that, and realistically most users don't have long compute intensive tasks in their workload. Dual cores are here to stay. Two is better, 4 better yet, but beyond that I the benefits seem to fall off, at least with the workload I can muster. -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org