Comment by mort96
3 days ago
Does it actually scale well to that many cores? If so, that's quite impressive; most video game simulations of that kind benefits more from few fast cores since parallelizing simulations well is difficult
3 days ago
Does it actually scale well to that many cores? If so, that's quite impressive; most video game simulations of that kind benefits more from few fast cores since parallelizing simulations well is difficult
No, see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=44KP0vp2Wvg . You're right it didn't scale that well
Looks like it may be capped at 32 cores in that video, if they are hitting 25%-30% of a 96 core CPU?
Here's analysis of a prior LTT video showing 1/3 of cores at 100%, 1/3 of cores at 50%, and 1/3 idle cores:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqSCRZJl7S0
In any case, CS2 can take advantage of far more cores than most games.
these big high-core systems do scale, really well, on the workloads they're intended for. not games, desktops, web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that. but scientific, engineering - simulations and the like, they fly! enough that the HPC world still tends to use dual-socket servers. maybe less so for AI, where at least in the past, you'd only need a few cores per hefty GPU - possibly K/V stuff is giving CPUs more to do...
> not ... web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that.
They scale very well for web and db servers as well. You just put lots of containers/VMs on a single server.
AMD EPYC has a separate architecture specifically for such workloads. It's a bit weaker, runs at lower frequency and power and takes less silicon area. This way AMD can put more such cores on a single CPU (192 vs 128 for Zen 5c vs 5). So it's the other way round - web servers love high core count CPUs.
not really - you can certainly put lots of lightweight services on it, but they don't scale. because each core doesn't really get that much cache or memory bandwidth. it's not bad, just not better.
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> not games, desktops, web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that.
Things like games, desktops, browsers, and such were designed for computers with a handful of cores, but the core count will only go up on these devices - a very pedestrian desktop these days has more than 8 cores.
If you want to make software that’ll run well enough 10 years from now, you’d better start using computers from 10 years from now. A 256 core chip might be just that.
why do you think lightweight uses will ever scale to lots of cores?
the standard consumer computer of today has only a few cores that race-to-sleep, because there simply isn't that much to do. where do you imagine the parallel work will come from? even for games, will work shift off the GPU onto the host processor? seems unlikely.
future-proofing isn't about inflating your use of threads, but being smart about memory and IO. those have been the bottleneck for decades now.
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