Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.

▲

rpcope1 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have come to doubt that single core or CPU performance in general, other than maybe specialty applications like CAD and some games, is all that noticeable for most computer users in the last decade. I can take relatively pedestrian users like my parents or my wife and put them in front of a decade old high end Haswell system or a brand new mega-$$$ threadripper/epyc and for almost all intents and purposes they don't notice a different. What they do notice is when things die. I'm sure consumer hardware might be OK for 2-3 years (maybe), but like for my parents, they're happier to keep using the same computer, and honestly the same Dell Precision system I gave them almost 10 years ago works great today, and I have a suspicion that the hardware, outside of maybe the SSD finally wearing out, will probably work right a decade from now too.

▲

rafaelmn 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Very few applications scale with cores

You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.

▲

VorpalWay 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ...

(Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.)

I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.

▲

rafaelmn 10 hours ago | parent [-]

But those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.

▲

loeg 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.

▲

zadikian 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.

	▲	loeg 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's coherent -- it's an argument for why most people don't want to buy Workstation class products just to get ECC. (Prices scale with core count. Not linearly, but still.)

▲

loeg 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Test suites often don't scale, actually. Unit tests usually run single-threaded by default, and also relatively often have side effects on the system that mean they're unsafe to run in parallel. (Sure, sure, you could definitely argue the latter thing is a skill issue.)

▲

zadikian 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In theory, do you need a single machine for any of that, or would it be cheaper to use a low-availability cloud cluster? Tests are totally independent, and builds probably parallel enough.

▲

throwaway85825 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Only a small percentage of computer users are programmers.