I spend a good chunk of the mid-1990s working out how to measure this stuff.
Things like I/O -- disk bandwidth and response time, amount of cache -- have far more immediate direct and perceptible effects than you might expect.
I caught Evesham Micros trying to sneak an engineering sample of the as yet unnamed and unannounced but rumoured Pentium MMX into a group test of Pentiums just because doubling the on chip L1 cache size resulted in a global 15% speedup of all apps and Windows itself.
The MMX instruction set itself was a toy and did no good to anyone. Hell, only now, 30y later, is 512-bit AVX starting to matter, and Intel screwed that one up as well.
A dual processor machine is palpably more responsive to use than a single core. Background tasks working on cached data so they don't hit the disk can help. If they need to hit the disk, it is -- to an approximation -- all over and your machine will slow down as badly as a 486 with Win95. (Scaled up.)
By and large background tasks are not intensive on anything. (Except antivirus.) So give them 1 core for them all to share and things get quicker.
Server CPUs now have dozens of cores. Desktop ones don't because they do not help.
Give those background tasks 2 or 3 cores, and nothing happens.
There are damned good reasons mainstream desktop CPUs are still 2 core/4 thread or 4 core/8 thread. Because it takes real effort and skill to create any kind of task that stuff is any faster at! It is genuinely hard to use at all.
This is a tiny bit of the genius of Apple, even now.
Its Arm64 chips have performance and efficiency cores and the OS is smart enough to schedule background stuff on the slow cores.
Result: nothing. You can't tell because, as I am saying, it doesn't matter. But now your battery lasts longer.
To extend my favourite metaphor...
To understand why more cores don't make your computer faster, read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month.
But it's quite long -- so buy 2 copies so you can read it twice as fast!
In fact, buy 2 more in LARGE PRINT and prop them up further away and now you can read in quarter of the time... ;-)
Re: A bit of offtopic, I guess?
Oh they are.
But not as much as you might think.
I spend a good chunk of the mid-1990s working out how to measure this stuff.
Things like I/O -- disk bandwidth and response time, amount of cache -- have far more immediate direct and perceptible effects than you might expect.
I caught Evesham Micros trying to sneak an engineering sample of the as yet unnamed and unannounced but rumoured Pentium MMX into a group test of Pentiums just because doubling the on chip L1 cache size resulted in a global 15% speedup of all apps and Windows itself.
The MMX instruction set itself was a toy and did no good to anyone. Hell, only now, 30y later, is 512-bit AVX starting to matter, and Intel screwed that one up as well.
A dual processor machine is palpably more responsive to use than a single core. Background tasks working on cached data so they don't hit the disk can help. If they need to hit the disk, it is -- to an approximation -- all over and your machine will slow down as badly as a 486 with Win95. (Scaled up.)
By and large background tasks are not intensive on anything. (Except antivirus.) So give them 1 core for them all to share and things get quicker.
Server CPUs now have dozens of cores. Desktop ones don't because they do not help.
Give those background tasks 2 or 3 cores, and nothing happens.
There are damned good reasons mainstream desktop CPUs are still 2 core/4 thread or 4 core/8 thread. Because it takes real effort and skill to create any kind of task that stuff is any faster at! It is genuinely hard to use at all.
This is a tiny bit of the genius of Apple, even now.
Its Arm64 chips have performance and efficiency cores and the OS is smart enough to schedule background stuff on the slow cores.
Result: nothing. You can't tell because, as I am saying, it doesn't matter. But now your battery lasts longer.
To extend my favourite metaphor...
To understand why more cores don't make your computer faster, read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month.
But it's quite long -- so buy 2 copies so you can read it twice as fast!
In fact, buy 2 more in LARGE PRINT and prop them up further away and now you can read in quarter of the time... ;-)