There seems to be a "trend" if that's the right word. The more cores in these CPU's the lower clock speeds they have per core. In the video it showed lower results for single core performance than compared to a quad core, it also had lower framerates in games than a quad.

Freddy probably has a really good sweet spot with his 6 core, higher clock speed set-up @ 4 GHz.

If you start over-clocking 10 cores than that power consumption and heat production is going to rise, fast.

I wonder if a few commodity i7s, on a Beowulf cluster, would be faster and make better sense economically?

The faster the clock speed the more current any given transistor will use just sitting doing nothing. The more complex the core the more transistors per core. The more cores...

This is why large areas of any given core are switched off when not in use (or under clocked) and the whole idea behind RISC (less transistors). The more efficient processors (as in MFLOPS per watt) are ARM chips and that's why they're in smart phones as the limiting factor is the battery.

Most gaming applications seem to use the GPU more than the CPU and an i5 still seems to be the sweet spot on price. 3D work, transcoding and other processor hungry apps could benefit if their multi threading works well. But ££ per MFLOP compared to time take to do a task, hmmm.

Yes I agree Snowy, for most desktop PC's a quad core is quite sufficient, still.

Quote from: 8pla.net on July 15, 2016, 15:33:57 PM
I wonder if a few commodity i7s, on a Beowulf cluster, would be faster and make better sense economically?

I'm not well clued up on Beowulf clusters.
Would be more power hungry and less capable of running every day programs and apps, I think.

It could have some cool number crunching abilities but these days they tend to use graphics cards for that.

I'm only guessing though.