kmckelvin wrote:HT virtually splits up cores to try and improve performance by letting a core switch contexts during blocking operations on a single thread.
hmm, that is not quite how multithreading works. CPU architecture is quite complex (obviously) but if you are keen to learn more about exactly how CPU's operate and work, may I recommend you look at something called NAND2Tetris as that will allow you to actually build your own CPU together with things like ALU (arithmic logic units) and logical processors. Just to make it clear, hyper threading is slightly more complex than your description and a CPU with hyperthreading available actually has two logical processors per core. There are certain units within the core that they do share (like Cache, memory addresses etc) but hyperthreading is not just software.
What happens with hyperthreading, and when you get poor performance is just bad coding be that form the OS or from the game developer. Given the crap quality of BF4 versus the pretty stable version of Windows, I would venture to guess the fault is not with Microsoft on this one. What happens from a programming perspective, and this is what you see when you start overclocking the kak out of a CPU is that not all the units (remember, I said certain units within a core is shared by the logic units) is not getting overclocked to the same extend as the logic cores etc. and this then causes a bottleneck.
Crappy programming does not realise that half the cores are HT cores and instead of spreading the workload out over the physical cores (core0, core2, core4 and core6) it will give it to core0,1,2, and 3 which effectively have 4 logic units processing the data and waiting for the shared units on the core. Whereas, in a perfect world, the workload should have been shared.
I seem to recall reading once that the die size increased roughly 5% (if memory serves me right) with the additional physical hardware needed on the CPU for the implementation of HT. So I say again, HT is not just software switches, there are actual hardware also doing the work.
Jarrod / Tiertjie, Let’s do a quick comparison between LGA2011 and LGA1150. For starters, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell parts all feature 16 PCIe lanes whereas the Extreme parts, i.e. Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E (i.e. Socket 2011) features 40 PCIe3.0 lanes that branch off of Ivy Bridge E. Remember the Ferrari versus the Mini-bus… more lanes is good, less lanes is bad.
I will agree that X79 does not have native USB3 ports, and that it generally only features 2 6Gbps SATA ports. However, saying that, motherboard manufactures have incorporated third party chips directly into their motherboards for either more SATA 6Gbs ports or additional USB3.0 support and with the amount of PCI-express lanes to play with, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. The difference between going native USB3.0 versus non native is that there will be a pico second increased in latency between the two. USB 3 is used to predominately use to transfer data, I assure you, you will NOT notice a difference between copy a 2GB file on a native USB3.0 controller versus an third party onboard controller. I could argue, that some motherboards have 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] party Ethernet adapters therefor surely that is worst for online gaming?
Personally, I would much rather prefer Intel to give me the PCI express lanes to do with them as I please. If I am in the mood for uber-fast hard drives (shall we say 8 SATA 3 drives) then I can plug in a proper high end raid controller, and not need to worry about the card impeding my graphics card’s bandwidth in the process. If I would rather prefer 4 Titans, then again, no problem I can plug them in and not have to worry about the natively supported USB3.0 features taking up all my PCI-express lanes which I will not use. Unless you are saying Paul will use USB3.0 to output his monitor, I don’t see a problem that it is not natively supported on X79.
Ok, so what else is the difference between 1150 and 2011 apart from the PCI-Express lanes discussed above? Shall we look at memory quickly? Obviously the better the CPU, generally the more L3 cache it supports, and as I’ve explained here:
http://blog.skoups.com/?p=592 more cache is good. Quad channel memory versus dual channel memory, need I even go into this topic?
We can argue stable platform, mature platforms, blah blah blah.
I like your Steam graphs... if that is anything to go on, all games will be written for dual core CPU's running 2.4GHz.
I think the one thing we can all agree on is that graphics cards is the first thing that will show it's age no matter what built you go for. Going for the uber GPU now, and a crap CPU means that in 3 years time, Paul will need to spend another R8k to get his games playing. (with diminshing returns from day one after buying the system). My solution on the other hand provides Paul a solid platform within his budget still, playing games are fairly good FPS NOW, in 18 months, another say R2k or R3k for say a GTX770 which should give him another 18 months game time. 3 years from now, (i.e. 18 months after getting the GTX770) he could pick up another GTX770 for R1000, or he could go ape shit and just get himself the GTX970ti for R3500. Over a 3 year time frame, going my route, you have not only ensured that he is able to continously play the latest games at very acceptable frame rates, but you have also saved him a lot of money in the process. My estimated second hand prices is based on historical averages of how fast GPU's depreciate in value. I also have not taken into account inflation in any of my quotes but that should cut both ways so not too concerned about it.
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