Quote:
Originally Posted by r00t
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There is no need to have "support" for hyperthreading. Create a process, launch 8 threads, you now support it if its available (arguable, it's up to the OS how it wants to pool them). On the i5, at best you will now have to context switch between 4 threads (and still have the same if not more cache misses, which is the biggest criticism of hyperthreading). Im just browsing the internet, checked task manager and system wide I have 1006 threads (though most are probably sleeping).
Any type of multitasking at all on your computer will benefit from the i7.
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Games can barely leverage more than 2-3 threads/core for the most part. Unless video editing, 3D rendering and other tasks that tend to be more heavily threaded account for a significant chunk of your workload then no, i7 is not worth the expense.
Multi-threaded or multi-cored CPUs have been around for nearly 10 years and games have barely started leveraging that. It is likely going to take many years longer for game programmers to effectively leverage quad-core. So yes windows itself can use all the cores but whatever app you are running most likely will not use all available cores. And who the hell runs a game, web browser, itunes and a few other programs at the same time on a few monitors to even use all the cores? On a personal computer clock speed is still king since most apps will only use 2-3 cores.
L2 compute