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Single CPU vs Dual CPU

FireFox

The Power Of Intel
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Hi everyone.

I have a short and maybe silly question.

Is it the same thing one single 8 cores CPU Machine and dual 4 cores CPU machine.

Thanks.
 
Depends on what you're doing with it. If there is a lot of context switching between several threads, the single die 8c part (assuming performance metrics are about the same,) will give you better performance because L3 cache will be local to all the cores. With two CPUs, if a thread starts on one CPU then ends up running on the second one, it has to get that data from main memory because it won't exist in cache, so there is a performance penalty when the same task is being divvied up between two independent CPUs. There is also a performance penalty if the amount of data you need to store for a task exceeds a single CPU's memory pool because latency will over double when a CPU needs to access another CPU's memory pool.

All in all, MP systems are great when your workload scales really well but, not so much when there are data dependencies between threads running on different CPUs. Simply put, there are more situations that will slow down performance on a MP setup versus a SP setup.
 
Let's say it will be for Gaming.
 
You'll get stuttering
 
Let's say it will be for Gaming.
A single CPU will always be better for gaming than a MP system because games have a lot of data dependencies. Memory latency between the two CPUs can severely harm performance. MP is not the way to go for gaming, ever. Games don't scale well enough to benefit from MP setups, just as they don't generally benefit from 8c setups. MP just makes matters worse.
 
Upgrading Core i7 5820k to anything for gaming, is useless ...
 
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