– Eight cores, 12 cores, 16 cores. It wasn't long ago that
just single core CPUs were the norm on home computers. But these days we're seeing
ever increasing core counts for less and less money. But, if we can have lots
of cores on just one CPU, what's preventing the powers that be from just putting multiple
CPU sockets on the motherboard and letting us have even
more cores that way? I'm glad you asked. Well, as it turns out, we actually did have multi CPU platforms for consumer grade chips
for quite a long time. In fact, you can find them
going all the way back to the pre-Pentium days
when we were all rocking 486 in our desktop rigs. But understandably, these setups were quite
rare for home users with one of the big
reasons being simply, cost.
Now, although a good CPU these
days isn't exactly cheap, it pales in comparison
to many popular CPUs of the late 1980s and early 90s. The 486 for example, cost
around $1,000 when it launched. Remember guys, this was
a single core processor. Another reason, was that
most applications for windows were simply not designed to take advantage of multiple processor cores. I mean, this is still true
to a lesser extent today, especially with games. But multi threading for
most consumer applications was almost unheard of until the mid 2000s. And if you were doing something at home that would benefit from parallel cores such as video editing, well, you're back to that same problem of having to take out a second mortgage.
But as time went on, silicon prices fell, and we ended up with
some multi CPU platforms that became somewhat
popular with home users. One, was Athlon MP released in 2001, with the MP standing for Multi Processor. It was AMD his first ever attempt
at a dual socket platform. And while it was designed with servers and workstations in mind, it did gain some traction
among enthusiasts, and a small handful of
systems built around Athlon MP even made their way onto store
shelves at local retailers. Another platform that was
more specifically focused on home users was Intel
Skulltrail from 2008. Now this dual CPU solution
was also derived from a server or workstation oriented product, in this case Intel Xeon nine. But, the motherboards had
more features that home users and gamers would want like overclocking, and fewer of the more obscure standards you'd typically see on a server board like, remote management.
Intel builds Skulltrail as
the ultimate gaming platform, partly because of the raw
power that you could get from two CPUs, and partly because it could
support multiple graphics cards in Nvidia SLI without an Nvidia chip set, which at the time was a pretty huge deal. Unfortunately, the platform
is mostly remembered as a failure because it was, you guessed it, extremely expensive. Especially when you factor
in the high end CPUs that were required in order to use it, not to mention that the dual CPUs didn't provide much gaming benefit even though it was kind
of marketed towards gamers and enthusiasts. AMD similar Quad FX
suffered a similar fate, as performance simply didn't stack up compared to the high costs and
demanding power requirements.
These days most folks running
dual CPU setups at home are using repurposed
workstation or server boards. But, despite the greater prevalence of multi threaded programs, these enthusiasts still remain
a tiny minority of users. You see, unlike earlier
high end platforms, where you could only get
four or eight cores maximum in a single socket, shrinking transistor sizes
and greater power efficiency mean that we can now
have as many as 64 cores on a single CPU package, like what we've seen with AMD latest, Threadripper processors. And especially when you factor in simultaneous multi threading, which allows one core to
work on two or more threads at the same time, that many
cores is enough performance for just about any home user.
Even if you're doing
something insanely demanding, then you've got the fact that there are potentially latency issues with having two physical
processors on the same board that you don't deal with
in a single socket system. That means that multi threaded workloads, even if they are well designed won't necessarily scale perfectly when you add more physical CPUs, which you can learn
more about in this video on our sister channel, Linus Tech Tips. So the short answer to
the question we asked at the beginning of the episode, can simply be summed up
as, diminishing returns. In much the same way that
adding a 13th subwoofer to your car couldn't
possibly make your neighbors any more upset than they already are, adding a second or third or
fourth CPU to your motherboard is probably not gonna make much
difference to the workloads you actually care about. But you know what you should care about? Corsair's Vengeance a4100
streaming and gaming PC features an AMD Ryzen 3000
series eight core CPU, and video GeForce RTX graphics and Corsair vengeance RGB pro
DDR4 memory optimized horizon. It also comes with an Elgato
4k60-Pro video capture card for high definition streaming, as well as dynamic RGB
lighting for great looks.
Learn more at the link down below. So thanks for watching guys like, dislike, check out our other videos and leave a comment of your suggestion for a future fast as possible. We love making videos
about your suggestions, saves us a lot of work
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