8 cores on a laptop?

[YourSurrogateGod]

Does such a thing even exist? I've googled around, but haven't found anything that says: YES, OUR LAPTOPS HAVE 8 CORES!!! explicitly.

I've found most high-end laptops armed with an Intel i7, which, I believe, is a quad-core. Am I wrong?

[TNFrank]

The new i7 Haswell is still a quad core but from what I heard on Techzilla it's power consumption is suppose to be very low so your laptop battery will last some 30% longer. Never heard of an Octal Core processor but I guess you could set up a mother board with dual quad core processors and have an Octal core machine, not sure why you'd want to do it though.

[Mikeb85]

Does such a thing even exist? I've googled around, but haven't found anything that says: YES, OUR LAPTOPS HAVE 8 CORES!!! explicitly.

I've found most high-end laptops armed with an Intel i7, which, I believe, is a quad-core. Am I wrong?

An i7 quad-core machine will appear to have 8 cores to the OS, due to Intel's hyper-threading.

The only 8-core processors I know of are AMDs, and Samsung's new Exynos chip in international (ie. not US or Canada-bound) Galaxy S4s...

[cprofitt]

Yeah, the upper level of the mobile Core i7 range is quad core with hyper-threading, the lower end i7s and all i5s are dual core.

[mips]

Does such a thing even exist?

Yes they do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kxNy1Dmtc

There are more but you have to search for them.

[YourSurrogateGod]

An i7 quad-core machine will appear to have 8 cores to the OS, due to Intel's hyper-threading.

Aaaah, maybe that's it.

[YourSurrogateGod]

Yes they do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kxNy1Dmtc

There are more but you have to search for them.

I hate to be a stinker, but it doesn't say terribly explicitly that there are 8 cores in that thing (or am I missing something?)

[mips]

I hate to be a stinker, but it doesn't say terribly explicitly that there are 8 cores in that thing (or am I missing something?)

Well the video heading says 8-core and also mention the xeon cpu which I know does 8-cores.

What do you want, a guy screaming at the beginning of the video 'this is an 8-core laptop'?

[3rdalbum]

Why do you need 8 cores on a laptop? Surely the other components of the computer would bottleneck the CPU's tremendous power (or not so tremendous - power and heat constraints). An 8 core desktop is a different story.

An 8 core mobile CPU would probably use slow cores, resulting in lower speeds in real life use.

[Moose]

8 cores on a laptop is like 3 engines on a pushbike. It's really unnecessary and I don't see why you would want more than 4-6 on a laptop.

[mips]

It's really unnecessary and I don't see why you would want more than 4-6 on a laptop.

Why would you need more than 2 cores?

[TNFrank]

Why would you need more than 2 cores?

Guess you forgot but there's still folks running those bloated Windows Op Systems on their machines.LOL.
My little 1.86GHz single core seems to be running Ubuntu just fine and my wife's dual core 1.5GHz laptop is uber fast with Ubuntu on it.

[Moose]

I could have worded that better. 4-6 cores if you want a gaming laptop.

[King Dude]

The most cores in a laptop processor around is four, and the highest clock rate without turbo boost is about 2.66Ghz. If you ask me, we probably won't see an eight core mobile CPU for a while. AMD and Intel will probably want to up the clock rate of quad processors from 2.66Ghz to about 3.4Ghz before they'll want to increase the amount of cores.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

Cores are not everything, most processes only use 1 core so if you have 8 cores it would the slower than a quad core as the quad core will have higher clock speeds
assuming the same architecture a 8 core at 1.2GHz is not better than a quad core at 2.2GHz depending on the application
an i7 is a quad core with hyper threading so it has 8 logical cores
AMD does have some 8 core CPUs desktop chips (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&SrchInDesc=8%20core&Page=1&PageSize=20)

[mips]

Cores are not everything, most processes only use 1 core so if you have 8 cores it would the slower than a quad core as the quad core will have higher clock speeds
assuming the same architecture a 8 core at 1.2GHz is not better than a quad core at 2.2GHz depending on the application
an i7 is a quad core with hyper threading so it has 8 logical cores
AMD does have some 8 core CPUs desktop chips (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&SrchInDesc=8%20core&Page=1&PageSize=20)

A dual core right now is better than any single core ever.

[King Dude]

Cores are not everything, most processes only use 1 core so if you have 8 cores it would the slower than a quad core as the quad core will have higher clock speeds
assuming the same architecture a 8 core at 1.2GHz is not better than a quad core at 2.2GHz depending on the application
an i7 is a quad core with hyper threading so it has 8 logical cores
AMD does have some 8 core CPUs desktop chips (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&SrchInDesc=8%20core&Page=1&PageSize=20)
Assuming the program can utilize eight cores, the eight core CPU is better than a quad core CPU, even if the quad core CPU were to have a higher clock rate. You see, the clock rate is multiplied by how many cores it has, so a 3Ghz quad CPU would be 12Ghz. However, on single threaded linear programs, only one core is used, therefor it runs at 3Ghz.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

A dual core right now is better than any single core ever.this is true

Assuming the program can utilize eight cores, the eight core CPU is better than a quad core CPUfairly sure i implied that, an example of this is some video encoding software, some batch porcessing software can use this

on single threaded linear programs, only one core is used, therefor it runs at 3Ghz.pretty sure i said that in different words, in this event a 3.2GHz quad core would be better than a 3GHz 8 core in this situation, given the same architecture

[The Spectre]

There are lots of reasons to want or need a CPU with as many Cores as possible as well as much RAM as possible.

Video Editing, Photo Editing, 3D Animation Creation, Video Trans-coding, Virtual Machines, Distributed Computing, Compressing and Decompressing Files and the big one for me is Multitasking and I am sure that I am forgetting many others.

Most of the newer CPU's can dynamically change the CPU speed or how many cores are being used based on the work load or if it is a single or multi threaded task and they can also reduce their speed if they are running to hot or to conserve battery life.

A faster Single Core or even a Dual Core CPU might be able to preform one single threaded task quicker than a slower Quad Core CPU but if you try to do anything else on the computer even as simple as checking your E-Mail and surfing the Internet will divert processing power from that Single or Dual Core CPU now resulting it that task running slower than it would have on a slower Quad Core CPU.

How often do you only do One thing at a time on the computer?

As an example someone might listen to streaming music while writing a Paper for work or school then you might have to go online to do some research for that paper and your downloading several large PDF Documents to include with the paper your writing and the next thing you know the computer is running like a slug because the Single or Dual Core CPU is having trouble keeping up.

Ultimately it boils down to what the Computer is going to be used for and what that persons needs and budget are.

If any type of Video Editing, 3D Animation Creation or Video Trans-coding is going to be done just be prepared to wait a while.

Here is an example of the speed difference going from a Single Core to a Dual Core to a Quad Core...

All of these benchmarks where run in the PeaZip for Linux 4.9.2 built in Benchmark Test.
I used Ubuntu 13.04 x64 in VirtualBox so I could assign One, Two and Four Cores to each of the different tests.

1 Core-------------------------------------------------------------------2 Cores-----------------------------------------------------------------4 Cores
243688 243689 243690

[3Miro]

The advertised number of cores for the CPUs is often times nothing more than a marketing trick. People can understand that 4-core has something more than 2-core, but most people have no idea about the implications.

- the maximum theoretical power of your CPU is the number of cores times the power of each core, i.e I have 6 cores at 3.2 Ghz and this is more than 4 cores at 3.6 Ghz

- with very few exceptions, manufacturers don't make single-core CPUs anymore. A modern CPU would outperform same rank older CPU regardless of the number of cores used.

- modern CPUs have the ability to dynamically vary the speed of each core, this is done to minimize consumption of electricity when the computing power isn't needed or boost performance for single core apps. For example, my CPU can run one core at 4.0 Ghz while keeping others at 1.2 Ghz (this is factory standard, I have not done any overclocking). In fact, both 3.2 Ghz and 3.6 Ghz would run one core at 4.0 Ghz, hence, for single core applications they will be the same.

- very few applications can use more than one core at a time, if you are using something that is very CPU intensive and can benefit from multiple cores, I am guessing that you would know it. Very few people use multi-core apps (games from the past 2 - 3 years would start to utilize multi-core architecture, older games would run single core only)

- every modern OS used a large number of background processes, hence, even if you are using only one single-core application you can utilize a dual core CPU by running the app on one core and the OS on the second (note that this wouldn't double the speed of your app, however, it will make it run more smoothly)

- there are many other factors that affect the performance of your machine. Memory access speed, if you have 4 cores but RAM can only send enough data for 2 cores, then you will not get the speed benefit. HDD latency is a huge issue, if you want programs that start fast then get an SSD, no CPU would help here . Games are usually more demanding on the GPU, if you are a gamer, then spend more on a video card than CPU.

- CPUs with more cores usually come with more cache, hence, this will give you an edge for some single-core programs. In this case, more cores means faster machine, although the boost has nothing to do with the cores.

- very few users need the power of the laptop from the YouTube video, this machine is marketed to a very small group of people.

- if you are mostly using your machine for browsing, then a good modern dual-core CPU is all that you need.

- if you are a gamer (i.e. Starcraft II) then you can benefit from a quad core CPU, however, if you are on a budget, then you should get a dual core CPU and spend more money on the GPU.

[QIII]

8 cores on a laptop is like 3 engines on a pushbike.

Sounds good to me!