Software will never catch up quad cores
 

A senior executive at AMD was honest enough and told Fudzilla that they believe that Quad cores will be overkill for most mainstream applications from now to eternity. They expect that a normal mainstream user won’t really need a quad core in the next few years as there is not necessity for such processing power.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?op...25&Ite mid=35

For mainstream computing this is correct for sure:)

Same thing has been said about 1GB hard drives too, wasn't it? ;) Or even 1TB hard drives...

It all depends on when the statement was made; since it may contain the element of "time".

I don't see any need for Quad Cores for office/home-PC in the next 5 years, as long as you don't intend to run the latest windows version;)

I think he has a slight bias because he can't make cheap to produce quadcores like Intel can.


If we are stricly looking at the home/office PC, any Pentium D gets the job done.

I was referring to Kougar's comment; continuity is key to a good dialog.

That was the point of my comment in the first place. Claiming "...they believe that Quad cores will be overkill for most mainstream applications from now to eternity." is simply wrong. Same as the article title, never say "never".

@ tuyen

Sh*t, I just deleted your craps. Feeling much better.:)

The most important part is when he says
.
Turn and twist it like you want, but he's right because most mainstream applications don't need a lot of processing power. You don't need a 5GHz octacore with 64Mb L2 cache to write a simple report in Writer.
Less mainstream applications (eg. Adobes CS3) that do require a lot of computing power and applications that are used in a business where time is a lot of money will support quad cores.

I actualy think that most applications that have been re-coded for dual cores will probably start supporting 4 cores when these cpus become more mainstream, because a lot less re-coding has to be done.

Both AMD and Intel aren't making good profit from Quad; the price will get back up. Dual and single core will remain mainstream for another two to three years at least. How many people own CS3 at this forum?

There was an article linked from Madshrimps a little while ago regarding Microsoft Office performance, going from 97 to the current Office 2007 suite. The simple sheer program complexity/weight has greatly increased with every new revision, and in many cases completely offset gains made from the performance difference from Pentium II's to Core 2 Duos. That's quite a large range of performance, yet MS Word or Excel files still open up slightly slower today than they did back with Office 97 on a PII or PIII.

My point is that program code/complexity is already an issue, that mess of code is going to need still further increases in hardware to offset the lost efficiency. DualCore support helped alleviate this, so it was embraced. I don't see this tendline changing anytime soon, although I would bet it will take longer for the jump to Quads, compared to the already made jump to Duals.

Sidney, I own Photoshop CS3 because I got tired of the **** that was Adobe Photoshop Elements. Don't get me ranting about Elements, the software made a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 feel like a 500Mhz Thunderbird and still had problems/bugs. :rolleyes:

Lost Planet and Supreme Commander have catched up with quadcores


I think, the challenge for the next Office is to keep on track, reduce a few functions and focus on speed.

Great, at least we have one.;)

I own a copy too, not installed because I don't have the need until I get myself a better camera.

Hardware manufacturers don't have to make faster hardware to compensate messy code, programmers should write code as optimal as possible. Even tough mainstream program get more complex, they still don't need multiple cores to run smooth. Multiple cores are only advantageous when you have to process a huge amount of data or have to calculate complex algorithms (best example is video processing, complex algorithms have to be applied on a huge amount of data).
Office doesn't use heavy algorithms or has to process a lot of data .

tell that to Microsoft;

Win2000+Office2000 runs faster on older hardware than Vista+Office2007 on newest hardware;)

That's exactly my point. :) If nothing else, ever increasing software bloat will force common applications to migrate to quads eventually. It's happened to duals already.