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Comment by zamubafoo | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming.

While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths.

Intel really has their work cutout for them with performance to cost for consumer desktops.

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Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most games pushed everything to a single drawing thread.

Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck.

Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.

that reminds me of what I had read on EverQuest 2. I downloaded it when it went f2p years after launch. My gaming PC had some issues with it which seemed nuts as it could handle more intensive games. After reading up on it, EQ2 came about a little bit before the shift to multiple cores which was to their detriment: they basically expected single core performance to keep going up substantially (as it had during EQ1 era) and not expanding to multiple cores. As such, they optimized against a configuration that never ended up existing.

Factorio is also limited by single core performance, with the developers saying they have no plans to implement multithreading.

This is unfortunate, and I'm saying this as an AMD owner and factorio player. Do you have a source for this?

The Witcher 3 likes all 12 cores on my Ryzen 9 3900X when running in Wine+dxvk, thanks to Vulkan (especially for faster shader compilation). Same as they are useful for compiling Mesa and Linux kernel ;)

It's like vehicles. Desktops/workstations and even most non-tablet laptops are now analogous to small trucks such as pickups. Tablets and phones are cars. Most people drive cars. Trucks are for work or people who like to haul stuff.

Servers and huge workstations I guess are like 18-wheelers and locomotives. :)

The "mobile is the future of everything" people were wrong. It's not that desktop is going away, but the market is re-segmenting. Most casual users don't need a desktop. They just need a UI device that can run apps and access services. So you now have a bisection of the computing device market into pro/workplace type devices and casual user devices. I suppose there's a third category too: hobbyist and enthusiast devices. That's where I'd put things like the Raspberry Pi or more techie geared laptops that run Linux.

I predict that rather than converging with mobile, desktop will actually pivot more toward pro, developer, and power user needs. Apple's recent 16 inch Pro release is a baby step in that direction on the hardware level. You'll probably see it at the software and OS level too. Desktop might actually shed a little bit of its user-friendliness gloss in favor of being unabashedly "pro." "If you don't want to know what a network, a folder, a file, or an IP address is, get a tablet."

Most people don't need a truck, maybe, but the three top-selling vehicles in the US are trucks. And in 2017 only 35% bought cars, with the rest being trucks and SUVs.

US is far from average needs of a car user. Not a representative sample.

A country the size of all of Europe is not representative of the vehicle market? Not sure I buy that.

USA is very sparsely populated (35 people per square km, 174th in the world), most of the people live in countries with more than 100 people per square km.

To be exact 67% of people live in such countries, and 83% of people live in countries more dense than US.

Source: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-dens... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aoJUhDHhhIvLRSPLsT7b...

It’s perfectly representative of the point, which is that the analogy is simply wrong.

Really? We're the #2 consumer of cars, about half of the annual car sales of China.

Suddenly number of wheels is analogous to cores...

Motorcycle - fast for gaming

Car/SUV - good general purpose

Truck (dually) - serious work (probably fun)

18-wheeler - move a load of loads at once

But apparently that makes the Ryzen 9 3950X a 16-wheel Porsche Cayenne Turbo S? Super fun to drive but you can use it to haul...

Hah... yeah the analogy gets silly if you make it literal and stretch it too far. I was just using it to talk about how different types of devices specialize for different use cases.

Phones: ultra-portable communication and rapid service interaction device -- basically a pocket terminal. Skill level: beginner / non-technical.

Tablets: casual computing devices suitable for reading, writing, some forms of content creation, and games. Skill level: beginner / non-technical.

Desktops/Laptops: more powerful and flexible devices for serious content creation, high-end gaming, development, heavy number crunching, etc. Skill level: intermediate to advanced users. They're still relatively easy to use for casual use cases but they have more knobs, expose more details, and have less training wheels / guard rails to keep you from breaking things.

Servers: big machines that sit in one place in a data center, office, or basement and run lots of stuff. Skill level: mostly advanced users.

SBCs like the Pi: hobbyist devices for hacking, DIY IOT, DIY automation, etc. Skill level: mostly advanced users.

Then of course there's a long tail of specialized and smaller devices like watches, FitBits, IOT, etc.

Phones: Electric Scooters or Regular Bike

Tablets: Electric Bike

Laptops: Standard Car, SUV, or Light Work vehicle (F150 space)

Desktops: Luxury, Enthusiast, or Specialist Market (Sports Cars, Anything above the F250, Hot Rod territory)

Servers: Work Vehicles (Semis, Flatbeds, etc.)

SBCs: DIY non-motorized vehicles

IoT: Shoes

I think its a great analogy. You can always get an over priced or over spec'd vehicle for your needs, but there are clear uses for some of the form factors.

>While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths.

It's not really that cut and dried, plenty of dev workloads are better served by high top single core, while plenty of gaming workloads are better served by multi core.

You are absolutely correct. I might be wrong but I've always heard that the general rule of thumb for gaming CPU purchases is get best single core speed if you aren't buying for a specific game. Also, I based my statement on my workloads which involves a lot of virtualization.

The gaming market is in some ways on the trailing edge of technology. While they're often one of the first to embrace new hardware, they're very slow to adopt changes in software or architecture because the engines that drive most of that are few and tend to evolve slowly. Until Unreal Engine, Unity, or one of the other major game engines fully embrace an architecture that allows developers to easily saturate multiple cores, most games are still going to be bottlenecked by single core performance. On the other hand, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone even remotely connected with development that full multi-core utilization is the only way to keep improving performance going forward, so sooner or later the game engine developers are going to need to fully embrace that.

Unity's new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) aims to take advantage of multi-threading by default. It's done transparently as far as it is possible, with the help of a new burst comipiler system, their new job system and the Entity Component System (ECS).

https://unity.com/dots

That's generally accurate. Per-thread ("single-thread") performance is the dominant factor in gaming performance. Even in multi-threaded games there is usually a critical thread that is limiting performance. Amdahl's Law: never not applicable.

I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly likely to contain 8 core (16T) AMD CPUs based on Zen2 (and a lot of games are made for the lowest common denominator).

This shouldn't be confused with the 8 core APUs found in current gen. Next gen will have an 8 core CPU and a NAVI 12+ GPU.

LinusTechTips made a video recently where they took an Intel Skulltrail, which is an enthusiast dual-socket Core 2 Quad platform from 2008(!), through a modern OS and game test. They platform was struggling until the enabled the Vulkan API in games. We have consoles to thank for that, without the low speed, high core count CPUs of the PS4 and Xbox One there'd be little justification for optimizing games for Vulkan and DX12

To be clear it's a shift from 8C8T to 8C16T (8C with SMT). The main change here is a massive (~3x) improvement in per-core performance.

It's not actually a shift to (significantly) more threading but actually a shift to more per-core performance, like desktop PCs currently use. Consoles are getting desktop-like processors for the first time.

This is creating quite a bit of anxiety in the desktop gaming community since high framerates depend on desktop processors being able to significantly outperform consoles on a per-core basis, and that will no longer be the case.

I LOVE that the gaming market has created a serious desire for quality desktop hardware.

I now build my workstations by hand and install Ubuntu. It's really nice to work on quality hardware!

As long as you want unnecessary lighting and gaping, EMI releasing, windowed cases.

To your point, it is getting much more difficult to find heavy duty cases that are 100% shielded. I prefer heavy duty cases both for shielding, durability and the benefits of being an additional heat sink.

Case manufacturers could just add their LED lighting outside the case in a clear plastic lining, since it is just for effect. Or if they want to get fancy, put a slim LED screen on each side so you can display the inside of any PC, or make it look like you have a RasPi in the case. Or make it look like you have vacuum tubes, or perhaps a fish tank, or an animated hamster wheel with tiny humans running fast. And don't link it to the OS. Just put a USB port that reads a directory of animated things or pictures, much like modern LED picture frames. Come to think of it, just buy two LED picture frames and stick them to the side of the case.

All easily avoidable.

I just build a mid-range gaming PC. CPUs don't have RGB, memory modules don't have RGB, some overpriced motherboards have RGB, HDD/SSD don't have RGB, some overpriced GPUs had them but I was looking for value for money.

on the GPU side, it seems RGB is the common thread. There are ways to disable it, but they aren't particularly great as they really only come into play post-OS loading (I have my GPU in an external enclosure so I see it more than I would in a desktop).

Memory modules do have RGB, but you specifically have to buy them (they're the exception, currently). CPUs don't have RGB, but the fans that are going to be mounted on them may be (Ryzen's CPU fans that come with the CPUs have them iirc). I don't see HDD/SDD going the RGB route considering they tend to be somewhat obfuscated, but the faster storage sticks that are all the rage in gaming PCs now may be a candidate (I say that mostly because of the RGB memory modules mentioned earlier).

It is a trend I wish didn't happen, honestly, but I know it is a case of trying to consolidate and appease two audiences (performance hungry users and enthusiasts) so it is what it is.

> CPUs don't have RGB

The AMD Wraith Spire is a stock heatsink and comes with lighting except on the APU models.

Only if you really try and know about it. The best case I liked had a 'window'. But at least it's black otherwise.

Turns out my graphics card has a led blinking logo too. I would have never assumed while buying it it's a thing.

LEDs on RAM: for when you absolutely positively must have the most fabulous rig at the LAN party. I guess.

I don't find it fabulous at all. MacBook aluminium, SGI cases, old Mac Pro case though...

For a gaming rig, I would take pride in it being silent and cold without spending too much (I know, those Noctua fans are still pricey but that is my upper limit).

I decided to update my Intel 4770k to an AMD 3900X. I had to upgrade to DDR4 as well. One of the things I specifically did not have to upgrade is the case. Just a couple of new fans really.

It's so your VTEC will kick in, yo.

We built a Ryzen machine in an old rack-mount workstation chassis at work before EPYC was released. The motherboard has a bunch of RGB contour lights on it, which you can see through the grille at the back of the chassis. Looks really daft in a rack.

you got a couple of options there. you can turn them off or black electrical tape them if there isn't a way (there usually is a way)

or, own it, make them as bright and blinky as possible and then just love it.

> you can turn them off

Often only through the Vendor's software that of course is only available for Windows.

I'd expect there are far, far more servers than there are developer machines. There are probably many more servers than hardcore gamers as well, and maybe even more than all gamers put together. It'd be nice to see some hard stats on this, however.

The vast majority of servers run on server CPUs, not on desktop CPUs. AMDs server CPUs are called EPYC, Intel's are called Xeon.

Which don't use desktop CPUs...

You're forgetting about the low budget CPUs used for desktop PCs. AMD has a pretty good standing with their Vega GPUs built into the Ryzen/Athlon APUs.

Or are you only talking about enthusiasts?

If we are looking at the budget systems, then AMD wins hands down. Not only do their Athlon 200 CPUs have appallingly good cost to performance ratios (with Vega GPUs and a CPU cooler), they also share the same socket with the Ryzen lineup.

At the moment, I wouldn't recommend anything but AMD for CPU since you can buy at any price point then upgrade. I think the only price point that Intel does have a slight advantage is the ~$500 mark.

And even then Intel's only advantage is on single-threaded workloads. At $500, you can get a 12-core AMD (3900X) for the same price as the 8-core Intel (9900K).

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