How many cores are you planning to have for Civ V?

[Quintillus]

I understand, what HT is, but i do not understand, what advantage it gives.
4 Cores * 2 Ghz or 8 Cores * 1 Ghz...sorry, i don't understand the benefit of the second option.

Hail's analogy is fairly good; it's important to note that in that analogy, the CPU (not the OS - this is lower-level than the OS) can pump water from both aqueducts at the same time. You can apply the same concept with more than two "aqueducts", and companies such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have done this. This technique in general is called "simultaneous multithreading" or SMT; hyperthreading is just Intel's marketing word for it.

And while having two actual CPU cores (like Core 2 Duo or Pentium D gives you) is better in terms of performance, it is not necessarily better in terms of chip area, which in turn affects chip cost. Hyperthreading averages 15-25% performance improvement when a program supports multiple threads (Intel cites 25% in their paper on the Pentium 4 with hyperthreading), but increases chip area by less than 5% (source). Adding a second core will approximately double performance (slightly less than 100% improvement), but will double chip area, and thus at least double the cost for the raw materials (likely more in practice). So it's not just marketing. The improvements may not be drastic, and yes, it is possible for it to decrease performance slightly, but there are good, technically sound, reasons to implement hyperthreading.

Adding hyperthreading to a computer with 4 cores at 2 GHz doesn't equate it to 8 cores at 1 GHz. Basically, if you're running a program that can take advantage of anywhere from 1 through 4 cores, you won't notice much if any difference. If you're running a program that could take advantage of 8 cores, you'll probably get a 15-25% performance boost. Key to why this is different than 8 cores at 1 GHz is if you consider a program that uses 1 thread, such as Civ4. On your 4-core, 2 GHz machine with hyperthreading, Civ4 will use 1 core at 2 GHz, with no benefit from the hyperthreading. On an 8-core, 1 GHz machine, Civ4 will use 1 core at 1 GHz - all else equal, it will run at half the speed as your 4-core machine with hyperthreading. Windows may show 8 "cores" in Task Manager, but you aren't getting half the speed per core with hyperthreading than without it.

If you're interested in more details, send me a PM. It's hard to say what crucial details I might be leaving out without knowing how much of a technical background you have, and I can't read German, so your earlier link doesn't help me.

Still planning to have two cores (without hyperthreading) whenever Civ5 comes out myself. Don't have the means to upgrade without the need to at this time, and my 2.7-year-old laptop doesn't feel that old, anyways.

 

[V. Soma]

Will civ5 have the need of sg. like Starcraft II?

If so then this might be interesting to read...

 

[slowtarget]

That's the point I was making. That puts dual-core at 57% of the market, and developers are going to be keeping that in mind when they determine their target market. Quad-core is still a small sector of the computer systems out there, less than half of dual-core, so it's not to their advantage to design with them in mind. They certainly aren't going to be designing their games with hex cores in mind, so all those extra cores are just going to be wasted for years to come. People who are paying money for those things are just being scammed as far as I'm concerned.

For those people with little software knowledge:

You don't need to do anything specific to make software work on two, three, or four cores (processors, whatever). You can make games that only use one core, and for them, a dual core won't make them any faster. However, you can't really make a game that will only work on a dual core machine. The best you can do is to make a game that will run very poorly on a single core machine (due to the fact that you've given it enough work for two cores when only one is available). Similarly, software written to take advantage of four (or six, or twenty-six) cores will still work on a dual-core machine, just not as fast.

For instance: TeamFortress2 was recently updated to support running on additional cores, but it won't see any improvement beyond two cores, but that is because it only uses two threads, and those threads run at all times. On a single core machine, those two threads must share a single core. On a quad-core machine, two cores are left with nothing to do.

If you design your game (as Firaxis said they have) so that all the work is done in tiny blocks in different threads, then you can distribute those blocks to whatever set of cores are available.

Think of it as a queue for a movie theater ticket booth. Everyone waits in one long line and there are multiple cashier windows. As a cashier finishes with one customer, they call up the next in the queue. If you've only got one cashier, its going to take a while. If you've got six, you're going to go through the line quickly. You can have four cashiers and let one go on break for a while and everything keeps working. It's not like you have to design your theater entrance as a "four cashier" entrance or a "two cashier" entrance. The design is simple and lets you use as many cashiers as you can fit in your theater.

This is the same way modern multi-threaded software is designed. Civ5 will (probably?) work on a single core computer, but the CPU (the "cashier") is going to have to work harder and it's not going to get to take many breaks. One a dual core computer, it's going to run with less effort. On a quad core machine it will probably have no problems keeping up with even the most intense parts of the game. A hex-core machine will probably have so little trouble that the CPU will spend a large amount of time at idle (metaphor: The "cashiers" will spend a lot of time on break).

Short story:

In a modern design, there is no reason not to support as many cores as you can imagine. There is a limit to how many that will be, but it is dictated by a designers ability to split up the amount of work, not by some predefined declarations such as "I am Civ5.exe and I use 3 cores."

 

[slowtarget]

Not cores, threads. There's a difference. With hyperthreading (HT), each core can run two threads. So if you have a four-core CPU with HT, for example the i7 "Lynnfield", the computer can work with eight threads at once. You operating system will see this as eight ("logical") cores.

Not quite.

Hyper-threading does not allow two threads to run on a single core. It allows each core to keep context on two threads, making context-switching between them almost instantaneous. The result is that the core will spend less time working on the threads, but they still don't run concurrently.

I think testing has shown that two threads on a hyperthreading core run 10%-40% faster than two threads on a non-hyperthreading core.

 

[civ_king]

News update, the the Phenom II X6 1055T is only $150, that's 6 cores @2.8 GHz from AMD, should own Civ V from the sheer core numbers, PS it can handle up to 4 ATI Radeon Graphics cards

 

[Maniacal]

Q6600 quad core 2.4ghz. No need to update until at least next year, only think i need to update is my RAM.

 

[V. Soma]

I am no tech-expert, so let me ask:

Firaxis says they plan civ5 with two cores in mind...
...will it then run MUCH better with four cores, or two will make me happy ?

(therefore: is i5 530 enough or i5 750 is a "must"?)

 

[Malchar]

You're going to need exactly 6 (or 12) because of the hexagonal tiles. Anything else will be a waste, if you can even run the game at all.

 

[V. Soma]

You're going to need exactly 6 (or 12) because of the hexagonal tiles. Anything else will be a waste, if you can even run the game at all.

HEXA - I am enlightened now!

 

[VirtualMark]

I'm pretty sure Civ 4 BTS uses 2 cores. Because both of mine are at 100% when Civ 4 BTS is running.

I'm going to wait for Civ 5 before i decide whether to upgrade or not. I'm using a Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5ghz, 4gb ram and a geforce 8600m gt laptop. It plays Civ 4 BTS fine, although gets slow on larger maps later in the game. If Civ 5 does indeed make use of 8 cores or threads then it may benefit significantly from a quad or hexa core cpu. Also hyper threading would also boost performance. However i don't really fancy usng a quad core in a laptop, mine already gets hot with 2 cores.

 

[feelotraveller]

I'll be limping along with my dual core until it gets unplayable (my last upgrade was so that I could play civ 4). Hope they don't make the graphics so snazzy that it grinds to a halt.

 

[slowtarget]

I am no tech-expert, so let me ask:

Firaxis says they plan civ5 with two cores in mind...
...will it then run MUCH better with four cores, or two will make me happy ?

(therefore: is i5 530 enough or i5 750 is a "must"?)

From what I've heard, the design Firaxis chose will scale to as many cores as you've got. If they said they planned for it to to work on two cores, it would simply mean that they've planned the processor loading for two cores. If you have a single core, it would be overloaded, if you have four cores, you'll run faster/cooler.

 

[Challs]

Oh my god, 12 cores, is that even possible? My Civ 4 is doing fine on my dual core, with all graphics at the highest, and with a decent resolution.

 

[The_J]

That's true, because Civ4 will never ever use more than 1 core.


@the 12 cores:

No one has mentioned here, that up to 8 cores are supported?

according to bigdownload, yes. (see the confirmed features thread)

 

[civ_king]

I believe what they did was make the game generate many small threads so it can run utilizing many cores,

@12 cores Magny-Cours has a word for you because it has 12 cores plus there are multiprocessors motherboards for it

 

[RRtexasranger]

News update, the the Phenom II X6 1055T is only $150, that's 6 cores @2.8 GHz from AMD, should own Civ V from the sheer core numbers, PS it can handle up to 4 ATI Radeon Graphics cards

The X6 1055T is fairly slow in games and doesn't even stand a chance against the i7 processors when it comes to gaming. Just because you have 6, inefficient cores based on an aging architecture does not mean it is better than the i5 750 or the i7 860.

 

[civ_king]

The X6 1055T is fairly slow in games and doesn't even stand a chance against the i7 processors when it comes to gaming. Just because you have 6, inefficient cores based on an aging architecture does not mean it is better than the i5 750 or the i7 860.

for the prices the X6 does decently, plus with Civ V the more cores the better

 

[civ_king]

CyberPower and Maingear have both released Phenom II X6, Cyber Power has a base model at $699 and Maingear at $999