# Quad Core vs. Hexacore



## vwad (Jul 30, 2010)

Hi,

I have this one doubt in my mind regarding the cores of AMD CPUs.

Which will be a better bet in the long run if I am not a gamer, A Quad Core i.e. Phenom II x4 series or A Hexacore i.e. Phenom II x6 series.

Is the core advantage only limited to opening of multiple applications simultaneously or are there any other advantages apart from this for the better use and getting the work done more effectively from those applications ?

This thing caught my attention when I was looking for a combo and found two of them, 890GX chipset with Phenom II x4 & / OR 880G chipset with Phenom II x6, because both of these as a combo cost same.

I also compared the two chipsets for that matter and could not find much difference rather than crossfireX which in my personal case does not matter much since me no gamer.

I would like to discuss this topic really deeply.

Regards,
vwad


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## happy17292 (Jul 30, 2010)

AMD phenom II X6 is future proof

and application which support 6 core parallel processing will run faster on 6 core than on quad core.

phenom II X6 is good proccy


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## coderunknown (Jul 30, 2010)

it fully depends whats your use. if just light computing, Athlon II X4 best. if gaming, Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4. if some heavy multimedia work, Phenom II X6. & i'll say it again, get the pc in balance, even if your work is more poised on just one particular thing. so even if no gaming, its always better to include a moderate proccy + a entry level graphics card than a IGP. or you can opt for a card later.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Jul 30, 2010)

Sam.Shab said:


> it fully depends whats your use. if just light computing, Athlon II X4 best. if gaming, Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4. if some heavy multimedia work, Phenom II X6. & i'll say it again, get the pc in balance, even if your work is more poised on just one particular thing. *so even if no gaming, its always better to include a moderate proccy + a entry level graphics card than a IGP*. or you can opt for a card later.



why so???
if no gaming then a good processor should be on the list and not an entry level graphics which will become useless soon...the second option is good


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## Terabyte (Jul 30, 2010)

I don't expect 6 cores being utilized in the near-future i.e say 2 years.
However this is only my opinion.
About the core thing, the equation is simple -
More cores = more multitasking capabilities
And I don't think 890 chipset is significantly better than 785/790 apart from SATA 3.0.
So my choice still would be X4+785.


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## vwad (Jul 30, 2010)

happy17292 said:


> AMD phenom II X6 is future proof
> 
> and application which support 6 core parallel processing will run faster on 6 core than on quad core.
> 
> phenom II X6 is good proccy





Sam.Shab said:


> it fully depends whats your use. if just light computing, Athlon II X4 best. if gaming, Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4. if some heavy multimedia work, Phenom II X6. & i'll say it again, get the pc in balance, even if your work is more poised on just one particular thing. so even if no gaming, its always better to include a moderate proccy + a entry level graphics card than a IGP. or you can opt for a card later.





Jaskanwar Singh said:


> why so???
> if no gaming then a good processor should be on the list and not an entry level graphics which will become useless soon...the second option is good



Thanks bros.

Hmm Interesting thoughts.

The thing I had in mind was 880G + x6.

Looks like I am thinking on the right track. 



Terabyte said:


> I don't expect 6 cores being utilized in the near-future i.e say 2 years.
> However this is only my opinion.
> About the core thing, the equation is simple -
> More cores = more multitasking capabilities
> ...



Hmm. Interesting. Yes, I also have the same feeling, but its just that 880G based board is available at a slightly minor more money than 785/790, so I could not keep myself from going towards it.


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## Terabyte (Jul 30, 2010)

See the cheapest X6 processor costs 10.5k
Then see not cheapest yet decent X4 945 costing only 7k
The difference is 3.5k.
I would say a good amount of money saved.


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## vwad (Jul 30, 2010)

Terabyte said:


> See the cheapest X6 processor costs 10.5k
> Then see not cheapest yet decent X4 945 costing only 7k
> The difference is 3.5k.
> I would say a good amount of money saved.



Hmm. This also sounds perfect.


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## ajai5777 (Jul 30, 2010)

880 or 890 + Phenom II X6 is the way to go if you are not in to gaming.
We can even play latest games (in low resolution) with HD 4200 or HD 4250. Then why does a non gamer need a dedicated GPU ?


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## vwad (Jul 30, 2010)

ajai5777 said:


> 880 or 890 + Phenom II X6 is the way to go if you are not in to gaming.
> We can even play latest games (in low resolution) with HD 4200 or HD 4250. Then why does a non gamer need a dedicated GPU ?



Yes, you are right. But I am also in to video capturing and encoding. Still manage to upscale quite good on my VIA grandpa chipset but need a more dedicated and pro solution.


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## coderunknown (Jul 30, 2010)

Jaskanwar Singh said:


> why so???
> if no gaming then a good processor should be on the list and not an entry level graphics which will become useless soon...the second option is good



well yes, a graphics card can be dropped as IGP improving a lot nowadays. but spending a ton on a costly proccy isn't a very good option, if it isn't going to be used fully.



Terabyte said:


> See the cheapest X6 processor costs 10.5k
> Then see not cheapest yet decent X4 945 costing only 7k
> The difference is 3.5k.
> I would say a good amount of money saved.



thats what i mean by "moderate proccy". rest of the money can be invested in more ram or spend it here & there


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## asingh (Jul 31, 2010)

With the way software games are scaling, multi core is better. Question is..can you afford it. And the feasibility. Games like BC2 recognize all 6 cores, so do multi thread applications. Need to weight it out.


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## mavihs (Jul 31, 2010)

Terabyte said:


> I don't expect 6 cores being utilized in the near-future i.e say 2 years.
> However this is only my opinion.
> About the core thing, the equation is simple -
> More cores = more multitasking capabilities
> ...


i would completely disagree with you! there is a tread going on right now which is moving towards multi thread applications including games whcih are also going to start using multiple cores soon!
also the OP will be doing video encoding so a hexacore will be way better for his work then a quad core as more of the video encoder are using the CPU!
@OP
but if you uses some of the latest video encodes then you'll need a GPU!


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## vwad (Jul 31, 2010)

mavihs said:


> i would completely disagree with you! there is a tread going on right now which is moving towards multi thread applications including games whcih are also going to start using multiple cores soon!
> also the OP will be doing video encoding so a hexacore will be way better for his work then a quad core as more of the video encoder are using the CPU!
> @OP
> but if you uses some of the latest video encodes then you'll need a GPU!



Yes, I am buying GTS 250 along with this


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## mavihs (Jul 31, 2010)

vwad said:


> Yes, I am buying GTS 250 along with this


don't buy 250GTS, its out dated & not worth it!!! if you wanna buy a GPU then go for 460GTX or wait for 450GTS!!!!


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## Cool Buddy (Aug 1, 2010)

OK, so here's something I would like to write on this thread, may be many of you already know it, just for the ones who don't.
Present day desktop processors are not capable of parallel processing, that is, multiple cores of the same processor cannot process a single thread simultaneously.*So the advantage of multiple cores is realised only when you open multiple applications. each application will create its own thread and separate cores will process separate threads.
However, it has been long since multi-core CPUs were introduced. There are many applications which require huge processing power. SO the thread limitation was working against them. If these applications utilized just one core, the remaining cores would just sit idle while the application would take ages to complete the task with just a single core. So they found a workaround, multi-threaded apps. If different cores could not handle a single thread, why not give them multiple threads?
I will take the example of dbpower music converter. When I encode music with the help of this software, it cannot utilize 2 cores to encode the same song. But say I add 4 songs at a time. If it were to utilize a single core it would take 4 minutes to encode all songs (say 1 song takes 1 minute). But since I have a dual core processor, it creates 2 separate threads and encodes 2 songs at a time, one with each core. Thus the process takes just 2 minutes. If I would have had a quad core processor, it would create 4 threads and the process would take just 1 minute.
As technology improves, most processor heavy apps are moving to the multi-threaded approach. So saying that the only advantage of multi-core processor is in multi-tasking, is wrong. It depends on what software you are using.
Similarly, even the GPU is being utilized in new ways these days. Unlike the CPU, stream processors of a GPU are capable of parallel processing. This is what makes them so powerful. But their limitation is that they cannot perform any type of calculation like the CPU. but programmers are finding ways to harvest the power of the GPU. For example, a few days back I was trying to recover the password of a rar archive. The software I was using could utilize the GPU for the brute force attack and could find out the result in 1-5th of the time as compared to using just the CPU. But there is no graphics processing involved in that process.
SO yes, although multi-tasking is where the main advantage of multi-core CPUs is, that is not the only advantage. And also, sam was right in saying that it's better to get a graphics card even if you are not going to game much. You never know, which process is utilizing what part of your computer.

---------- Post added at 08:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:00 AM ----------

@vwad
is that deep enough?


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## vwad (Aug 1, 2010)

Cool Buddy said:


> OK, so here's something I would like to write on this thread, may be many of you already know it, just for the ones who don't.
> Present day desktop processors are not capable of parallel processing, that is, multiple cores of the same processor cannot process a single thread simultaneously.*So the advantage of multiple cores is realised only when you open multiple applications. each application will create its own thread and separate cores will process separate threads.
> However, it has been long since multi-core CPUs were introduced. There are many applications which require huge processing power. SO the thread limitation was working against them. If these applications utilized just one core, the remaining cores would just sit idle while the application would take ages to complete the task with just a single core. So they found a workaround, multi-threaded apps. If different cores could not handle a single thread, why not give them multiple threads?
> I will take the example of dbpower music converter. When I encode music with the help of this software, it cannot utilize 2 cores to encode the same song. But say I add 4 songs at a time. If it were to utilize a single core it would take 4 minutes to encode all songs (say 1 song takes 1 minute). But since I have a dual core processor, it creates 2 separate threads and encodes 2 songs at a time, one with each core. Thus the process takes just 2 minutes. If I would have had a quad core processor, it would create 4 threads and the process would take just 1 minute.
> ...



Thanks Extremely informative & perfectly put 

Deeper than bore-wells


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## Cilus (Aug 1, 2010)

Great pic of Info Cool Buddy. You have provided a good overview of GPGPu or General Processing GPU concept.
One update from my side. Very sooner application GPU for processing is not just going to be used for Multimedia related applications, but also for general level of applications.

Few days back Infosys signed contract with Nvidia for developing CUDA applications for applications like Database operations, Data Warehousing and even for normal web and windows applications.

So sooner we are going to get some CUDA projects over here.*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/images/icons/icon7.gif


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## asingh (Aug 1, 2010)

Cool Buddy said:


> OK, so here's something I would like to write on this thread, may be many of you already know it, just for the ones who don't.
> Present day desktop processors are not capable of parallel processing, that is, multiple cores of the same processor cannot process a single thread simultaneously.*So the advantage of multiple cores is realised only when you open multiple applications. each application will create its own thread and separate cores will process separate threads.
> However, it has been long since multi-core CPUs were introduced. There are many applications which require huge processing power. SO the thread limitation was working against them. If these applications utilized just one core, the remaining cores would just sit idle while the application would take ages to complete the task with just a single core. So they found a workaround, multi-threaded apps. If different cores could not handle a single thread, why not give them multiple threads?
> I will take the example of dbpower music converter. When I encode music with the help of this software, it cannot utilize 2 cores to encode the same song. But say I add 4 songs at a time. If it were to utilize a single core it would take 4 minutes to encode all songs (say 1 song takes 1 minute). But since I have a dual core processor, it creates 2 separate threads and encodes 2 songs at a time, one with each core. Thus the process takes just 2 minutes. If I would have had a quad core processor, it would create 4 threads and the process would take just 1 minute.
> ...



Why would you say that present day software(s) are not capable of processing a thread at the same time. It does not make sense. One thread is an instruction cycle, it cannot be broken up into two parts and handed off to separate cores. Yes, if the application is multi threaded (which is quite easy to do these days), then 'n' threads can be passed of to the next thread queue or if a core is sitting idle.

Also GPUs can perform calculations. And they perform them to great floating point levels. How you think pixels are rendered with the angle to the viewer. They follow extreme parallelism using SIMD logic. 

Once can invest in a lower end GPU if not gaming, but a GPU is not at all mandatory. I have a ATI FirePRO at my office, and it does jack...!  Most of my work is on programming IDEs and SQL RDBMS system, so I can easily do without a GPU. Hardly a requirement.


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## mavihs (Aug 1, 2010)

asigh said:


> Why would you say that present day software(s) are not capable of processing a thread at the same time. It does not make sense. One thread is an instruction cycle, it cannot be broken up into two parts and handed off to separate cores. Yes, if the application is multi threaded (which is quite easy to do these days), then 'n' threads can be passed of to the next thread queue or if a core is sitting idle.
> 
> Also GPUs can perform calculations. And they perform them to great floating point levels. How you think pixels are rendered with the angle to the viewer. They follow extreme parallelism using SIMD logic.
> 
> Once can invest in a lower end GPU if not gaming, but a GPU is not at all mandatory*. I have a ATI FirePRO at my office,* and it does jack...!  Most of my work is on programming IDEs and SQL RDBMS system, so I can easily do without a GPU. Hardly a requirement.


which one?(just curious)


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## Cilus (Aug 2, 2010)

Asigh is right abt the GPU processing thing. But till date Stream processors of a GPU do not support complex instruction sets. For example finding square root of a number can be performed by a single instruction in CPU, but not possible in GPU. What is the most advantage of GPU processing is it can perform a simple operation, say a color invert operation in very very large number of elements simultaneously. It mainly works in vectorized way.

For example  you are performing an operation X=X+2 over 1 million values of X. Here CPU will execute it sequentially, although use of SIMD instruction set will increase the performance, whereas a GPU will perform the same operation over the 1 million element as a vectorized unit. So a single GPU cycle will be required to perform this operation over all X.


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## Cool Buddy (Aug 2, 2010)

asigh said:


> Why would you say that present day software(s) are not capable of processing a thread at the same time. It does not make sense.


I didn't say anything like that, which line are you referring to?



asigh said:


> One thread is an instruction cycle, it cannot be broken up into two parts and handed off to separate cores. Yes, if the application is multi threaded (which is quite easy to do these days), then 'n' threads can be passed of to the next thread queue or if a core is sitting idle.


I did say there are a lot of multi-threaded apps these days



asigh said:


> Also GPUs can perform calculations. And they perform them to great floating point levels. How you think pixels are rendered with the angle to the viewer. They follow extreme parallelism using SIMD logic.


I didn't say they do not perform calculations, but they do not perform all types of calculations like CPUs, only specific types of calculations



asigh said:


> Once can invest in a lower end GPU if not gaming, but a GPU is not at all mandatory. I have a ATI FirePRO at my office, and it does jack...!  Most of my work is on programming IDEs and SQL RDBMS system, so I can easily do without a GPU. Hardly a requirement.



Finally, your knowledge is technical, while my knowledge comes purely from a general interest in computers. I can never match you. So thanks for the insight on GPUs, I like feedback on my posts. That helps me increase my knowledge, that's the reason I come to this forum. Hope you understand why I go wrong sometimes. (lack of knowledge about technical terms)


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