I'm not sure what to think of it, I'm currently not impressed with Quad-Core processors. Plus a lot of tools have difficulty to display the correct CPU usage.
I have to agree with you. I can't believe x86 has been stagnant on 4 cores for nearly a decade, and completely overtaken by smartphones chips in speed of innovation.
Last year I replaced my 8 year old desktop, with a new Acer Predator (Intel Core i5-4xxx) but I hardly see any performance gains. Of course everything feels a bit smoother, but I expected more. I think software also needs to be optimized in order to profit from more powerful CPU's. If you want to gain performance, SSD's and a fast GPU are more important at the moment.
There still aren't that many multi-threaded apps. But, for example, you'll notice a huge difference with VirtualBox. And in Windows, Excel will use all available cores.
AMD's cores are so inefficient compared to Intel. They need to work on that. But, if all you're doing is browsing the internet and word processing, CPU speed is basically irrelevant these days. Disk I/O is the main bottleneck. GPU only matters if you're gaming.
I agree. SSD and antivirus that does not slow down system will show more benefit to the system speed than CPU.
LOL, I recently reinstalled my Win 8 system, so once again I got to see just how bad McAfee Internet Security really is. It will use 100% of the CPU during scanning, don't these guys feel ashamed for producing such crap?
McAfee is a POS. Try Avira free AV. You'll be impressed. Avira's virus detection ability is also years ahead.
Yes, I guess so. What makes me so negative is the fact that all browsers on my system, like Firefox, Opera 12, IE and Vivaldi, use relatively quite a lot of CPU time during loading of websites. Of course it also depends on the amount of scripts it has to process, but sometimes browser performance still feels a bit choppy, I didn't expect that with a Intel Core i5 CPU. But like you said, it's probably not the CPU that should be blamed, it's the software developers who can't seem to build less resource hungry applications and browser engines. That's why I'm very interested in the new Microsoft Edge (Spartan) engine. I also noticed that the content displayed in Metro apps run a lot smoother than regular websites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge
If you are getting rid of it do regular uninstall and after restart run their MCRP tool for uninstall... http://us.mcafee.com/apps/supporttools/mcpr/mcpr.asp I can recommend Webroot AV, the only thing you should do is to set Heuristic one step up in the settings. This AV is very light comparing to AVIRA which has better detection, however, does not have strong detection rate against PUPS. (at least in my experience in USA). Furtehrmore you can get Webroot AV for $5.99 at Newegg. (dont forget to disable Microsoft Defender)
Yes that's what I use, AFAIK it's not even possible to get rid of it with the standard installer. And thanks for the tip, but I'm not into AV's. I just wanted to point out how horrible some AV's are.
As processing power and ram capacities increase, developers can use more and more of it to enhance their applications. I don't think it's fair to say that because application X from 2010 uses 50% of a mid range CPU from 2010, the current version of application X should be expected to use less than 50% of a current mid range CPU. Because CPU's are faster and RAM is more plentiful, developers can add new features or utilize more of the resources available to them. Compare Chrome from '10 to the current version of Chrome. There are significantly more features and it is significantly faster BUT it uses more ram the the version from '10 (not sure about CPU). Additionally, code can only be optimized so much and I doubt people want to rewrite their applications in assembly to achieve higher performance after they've exhausted the features of the language they're currently using to optimize the app. Heck, I don't think many people want to write any applications in assembly unless you're a nut like the guy that made Roller Coaster Tycoon.
I love my apps lean and mean. Because the less resources apps are using (even on powerful new machines), the less choppy a machine will feel, especially when multitasking. And it will also save power, which is important for laptops. If people keep building more bloated apps, then you will start to see less and less performance gains, no matter how fast the CPU is. I hate it when I see that browsers like Vivaldi use a lot of CPU time, even when in the background, because that computing power could have been used by some other app or videogame. Older browsers like Opera 11 and 12, were much more efficient. But that was back in the day, because now they have difficulty rendering pages with lots of scripts.
