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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

They're coming in at half the price of equivalent Intel chips. They don't need to win, necessarily (which I didn't think was going to happen), they need to be competitive for a lot less money.

EDIT, in response to the other edit: sorry about that, I wasn't sure which comparison you were making. Still, the difference is slim enough that if I were in the market, I'd go with this one just to put the heat on Intel.

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I'm definitely going to be building a PC with one of these CPUs some time this year. I've been holding off on an upgrade because I couldn't justify the cost. This is a lot more reasonable.

You do have to consider that this is an 8 core, and more and more applications are being developed with this in mind. Whoever still thinks that Single threaded performance is the most important, lives in the past.

Consumer applications? Doubt it. Not a whole lot of consumer-oriented applications parallelize that well to be honest.

look at how many threads your Chrome is running

All but one set (for the active tab) of which are probably idle or effectively so most of the time.

Only Servo parallelizes single-page rendering as far as I know.

but they're moving in that direction

This review has a CPU web test section, you can see performance is mostly a function of IPC and clock speed.

Even crusty old Microsoft Excel parallelises worksheet recalculation.

Sure, but Excel is presumably one of the most optimized (in terms of the amount of money and brainpower devoted to optimizing it) applications in existence.

That's not the feeling you get when you use it, it seems more like the underlying engine hasn't really changed a great deal in 20 years.

That's the price of backward compatibility. But I think it's a bit of a "Seinfeld is unfunny"[1] situation; if Microsoft decided to save on the nine-figure budget and outsource Excel development to, say, your favorite purveyor of antivirus software, you'd notice real fast.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny (apologies for the TVTropes link at night!)

don't you run more than one of them at a time though?

That's not true. 2 weak horses != 1 strong horse. 1 strong horse can do the work of 2 weak horses, but not the other way around. A single core can run multiple threads, but multiple cores can't work together on a single-thread task.

Actually, 2 weak horses could probably equal 1 strong horse.

http://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-two-horses-pulling-tog...

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