For much of the 2010s, we were stuck with mainly dual-core and quad-core CPUs in PCs. However the arrival of Ryzen shook the PC industry, causing a rapid increase in core counts. At the time, there was fervent discussion on this matter, with many questioning if more cores were worth it, and how many cores are more than enough?
So how do things stand today? The latest Intel and AMD consumer processors top out at 24 and 16 cores respectively. What extent of modern software can take advantage of all those cores? What modern workloads are still bottlenecked by single threaded performance?
Gamer checking in. Single core performance is very important as games are not quite yet capable of taking advantage of say 12 cores compared to 6 higher performing cores.
It’s why the 5600x3d performs so closely to the 5800x3d while gaming despite it being a 6 core vs 8 core comparison. We encountered something similar a decade ago with i5 vs i7 for gaming games we’re not capable of taking full advantage of hyperthreading. But as time went on the gap between the two widened.
As a gamer what do you think about Intel’s E-cores? I have heard that E-cores are detrimental to gaming performance, with some gamers disabling them or instead opting for AMD CPUs.
It’s very situational, usually the difference is negligible or better (when they’re enabled).
The E cores are termed efficient is because they’re efficient in regards to how much physical space they occupy, not in terms of power/performance.
if you game, disable ecores in bios and forget about them.
Not only are e-cores useless for gaming, they create issues.
For gaming, I think cache is more important than single threaded performance, tho. A 5600X3D is faster than a 5800X in gaming, even though the 5600X3D has fewer cores and lower clocks.
A single core benchmark (or any single core workload that doesn’t utilize the cache) will only reflect the clock speed between the two, not the gaming performance.
Cache is not a different thing than single thread performance. Cache is part of single thread performance.