Digital Home Thoughts: How Many CPU Cores Are Enough?

"In the early years of the new millennium, with CPU clock speeds finally accelerating past the 1 GHz mark, some folks (Ed.: including Intel itself) predicted that the company's new NetBurst architecture would reach speeds of 10 GHz in the future. PC enthusiasts looked forward to a new world where CPU clocks kept increasing at an accelerating pace. Need more power? Just add clock speed. Newton's apple inevitably fell soundly on the heads of those starry-eyed dreamers who looked to MHz as the easiest way to continue scaling PC performance. Physics doesn't allow for exponential increases in clock rate without exponential increases in heat, and there were a number of other challenges to consider, such as manufacturing technology. Indeed, the fastest commercial CPUs have been hovering between 3 GHz and 4 GHz for a number of years now."

This is a long-standing issue with me - the battle between CPU makers putting more cores on their CPUs and software developers trying (mostly in vain) to create software that can utilize those cores. The article itself breaks it all down quite nicely through a series of benchmarks, but here's the bottom line: if you know you'll be using software that can properly utilize four cores, such as video editing software, you'll see big performance gains from going with a quad-core CPU. On the other hand, if you're not using software that can use four cores, you'll get more speed for your dollar by going for a dual-core CPU - you'll typically get more Mhz on a dual-core for the money.