Core i7-980X: Do You Want Six Cores Or 12 Threads?
Table of contents
- 1. Hyper-Threading On Intel’s Six-Core Gulftown Analyzed
- 2. How Hyper-Threading Works
- 3. Thread-Optimized Software
- 4. Test Setup And Synthetic Benchmarks
- 5. Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark Vantage
Intel first used Hyper-Threading when it introduced the Pentium 4 “Northwood” processor at 3.06 GHz and the Xeon MP “Foster” series in 2002. The proprietary technology's main purpose is to improve processor utilization through increased parallelization. With the latest Core i7-980X and its six physical cores, Hyper-Threading yields 12 logical cores on desktop PCs.
This raises the question: how much of the software that you run truly takes advantage of eight or more threads? Is Hyper-Threading good or bad for power efficiency? And wouldn’t it make more sense to stay with six physical cores, rather than risking performance hits caused by less-heavily-threaded applications unnecessarily distributing workloads to logical units?
Intel’s Gulftown implements Hyper-Threading to provide 12 virtual processing cores. Serious performance benefits can only be found in a few, specific applications.
Hyper-Threading History
Hyper-Threading was introduced almost out of necessity. Because the Pentium 4 processor employed a rather long instruction pipeline, it was imperative to ramp up operating clocks as quickly as possible and keep the pipeline busy. Therefore, Intel duplicated the units that store the architectural state, allowing a Hyper-Threaded core to appear as two logical processors to the operating system. The scheduler could dispatch two threads or processes simultaneously, and if Intel’s branch prediction worked well, it would ensure that instructions got loaded and executed efficiently.
The benefits for the Pentium 4 were mainly increased system responsiveness on single-core systems and small performance gains on applications. However, this applied to the desktop space. In servers, where parallel processing is key, Hyper-Threading showed more impact. Naturally, this was a reflection on the software industry at the time. Applications written for desktop users weren't threaded yet, since the hardware enabling this usage wasn't around. Initially, Hyper-Threading got a bad rap because it failed to improve performance in those titles that ran in a single thread.
… and the Return
With the arrival of the Core 2 processor, Hyper-Threading disappeared. But Intel decided to resurrect it with the Nehalem micro-architecture, which is the basis for all Core i7, i5, and i3 CPUs available today—including the just-released six-core Core i7-980X.
The situation is much different today than when Hyper-Threading made its first rounds. For starters, software developers are much more in tune with the hardware ecosystem, so it's uncommon to find a popular title that can benefit from parallelism and isn't threaded. Beyond that, AMD currently can't apply pressure to Intel in the performance segment, and Hyper-Threading has turned into a value-added feature and series differentiator, rather than a must-have innovation. With six physical cores, does Hyper-Threading really make sense?
We decided to look at the quad-core Core i7-975 Extreme Edition (Bloomfield) alongside the new six-core Core i7-980X (Gulftown) and compare performance, as well as power efficiency, using our updated platform benchmark suite.
- Hardware,
- Intel,
- hyper-threading ,
- core ,
- i7-980x
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Adobe creation is my primary use so it's 6 cores all the way for me, and with some careful rejigging of spec (i.e. dropping the 2nd 5870 I don't really need just yet) I can squeeze the i7 980X into my budget.
However, let's see how the i7 970 turns out send half of these year - I should image it'll be just as overclockable as everything else and we'll just have to do the Bclk/UnCore dance instead of cranking up the CPU multi.
Pff... This is so... I mean come on, who cares about the 7zip performance???
What I want to know is:
- does it make a difference with MS exchange?
- with linux/bsd servers like mysql, apache, samba?
- how does it influence virtual machine hosting? VMware? Linux KVM?
Hey, real world, are you there???
Is this tom's hardware or is this gaming-and-ziping-files-under-windows-hardware.com???
Pff... This is so... I mean come on, who cares about the 7zip performance???What I want to know is:- does it make a difference with MS exchange?- with linux/bsd servers like mysql, apache, samba?- how does it influence virtual machine hosting? VMware? Linux KVM?Hey, real world, are you there???Is this tom's hardware or is this gaming-and-ziping-files-under-windows-hardware.com???
it's a desktop processor, so they're doing desktop test. You want the server performance figures, wait til the Xeon comes out.
it's a desktop processor, so they're doing desktop test. You want the server performance figures, wait til the Xeon comes out.
Sorry but I second albert_einstein_22: not everybody uses server processors for servers... Some people (I am talking small companies of 1-9 people) happily use plain desktop PCs to run as servers...
Sorry but I second albert_einstein_22: not everybody uses server processors for servers... Some people (I am talking small companies of 1-9 people) happily use plain desktop PCs to run as servers...
Yeah OK, fair enough. But that's beyond the scope of the article - the i7 980X is a desktop CPU so Tom's are doing desktop CPU tests.
It's not rocket surgery.
And if Tom's reviews factored in every possible use for a CPU in their tests the articles would end up being more long-winded, unfocused and prone to perceived bias than they are already.
What this shows is that Intel are lieing and being disingenuous by showing threads as physical cores as the benefits are small and nowhere near the same as having extra physical cores.
or alternatively send that complaint to Microsoft and get them to change Task Manager to colour the logical cores in pink, not green.
Since when did Intel say this is a 12-core processor?
Very interesting read, Patrick and Achim. It's nice to know the current state of affairs regarding how well the desktop software is able to keep up with the latest hardware. The video transcoding tests certainly seem to be doing that..just wondered how fast, stable and accurate that task is when it's run on a GPU. Winzip..can't understand why those guy's haven't done some multi-threaded work, considering how popular that software is.
Hat's off to that as well..not everyone is jumping on the 'newer is better' bandwagon, and you made a reference to the AMD option, too. I'd be torn between the two, to be honest: Intel offering top-dollar performance and overlocking, and AMD offering first-rate bang-per-buck as well as decent overclocking together with more flexible system longevity.
Hello,
Good article. I have a question about the HT. How does it improve the home made computing programs? Can a usual user like a scientist to program a program that will HT efficiently?
Hello,Good article. I have a question about the HT. How does it improve the home made computing programs? Can a usual user like a scientist to program a program that will HT efficiently?
If you know how to write multi-threaded code and are up to speed on parallel computing then yes.
Thanks for the answer. I can write programs in Fortran. I was just wondering how advanced programming is it required ? Will suffice the usual parallel programming?
I have no idea - see what comes up in Google
Probably that would be enough since every windows applications goes through windows API to use multi-threading. CreateThreadEx, CreateProcess,...
Intel and AMD should develop turbo to a new level. I mean you disable cores when they are not needed and push the clock speed. When you need more cores and only then you enable dynamically HT. That would need the OS to develop some sort of cpu hot plug but it would not be very hard to adapt server OS code that already does that on the racks.
Be good to see some pro audio applications in these benchmarks - Ableton Live/Cubase 5 etc - tests of multi CPU hungry VST instruments and fx across enough audio tracks to bring a decent spec PC to its knees (easily done with such software...)