der8auer Says Adding CPU Cores Less Important Than Higher Clocks

At Computex earlier this month, PC Gamer met up with famed overclocker Der8auer to talk about anything and everything related to PC performance, including of course, overclocking. He was asked whether or not the trend of higher-clocked parts meant anything for overclocking, and no… that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Der8auer (aka: Roman Hartung) writes that “From my personal point of view, the development actually doesn’t make sense.”, and that “we are getting a ridiculous amount of CPU cores that nobody needs.” This comes in contrast to high clock speeds, which virtually everyone needs. He continues, “We need higher speeds, more efficiency. We don’t need more cores.”

Der8auer at Computex (credit: PCGamer)

As a workstation addict, I disagree with the idea that we don’t need these many-core chips, but I do agree that the number of people who need them are going to be dwarfed by the number of people who need them for gaming. At the same time, I don’t really feel like the market is lacking anywhere – you can complain that we don’t need 16-core chips, and that’s fair, but it’s not as though chips clockable to 5GHz are not easy to find.

I feel like saying that many-core chips are not important is a little short-sighted, as it would be to say that high-clocked chips are not that important by those who actually take advantage of all those cores. AMD is expected to release its 32-core (64-thread) Threadripper 2990X which might not be the highest-clocked part out there (it certainly won’t come close), but for those able to take advantage of so many cores, that part is going to feel like a dream come true.

That being said, we absolutely need chips with better IPC and generally better performance in general, but with the options that are out there right now, I don’t feel like the market is exactly lacking – unless there’s some game out there I don’t know about that’s dramatically affected by minute IPC gains are losses. If there is, I’d like to hear about it.

High-end video encoding can take good advantage of CPUs

Ultimately, if you’re a gamer, you’ll want the chip that will deliver the best clock speed, or IPC. For those with incredibly heavy workloads, a many-core chip is going to get the job done quicker almost always. That should mean that a solution like EPYC would be perfect for the high-end workstation, but the IPC there is even lower than Threadripper (first-gen), so that has to be taken into consideration.

After Ryzen launched, two of my friends chose Intel’s i7-8700K as their CPU of choice for their new gaming rig, simply because it offered the best blend of clocks and cores. Neither of these friends overclock, so at that point, buying whatever’s clocked the fastest makes the most sense. Conversely, if you buy a many-core chip, don’t expect an amazing gaming experience. Der8auer says, “if you have a 7980XE with 18 cores in your rig, versus an 8700K, you will lose in every situation if you’re a gamer.”

As I always like to say, it pays to know your workload – even if it’s gaming. It doesn’t matter what chip you end up choosing, as long as it works best for you. But, it goes without saying, that if you want to eke a little more performance out of your hardware, overclocking is a great option. Assuming your cooling is in order, and you also have a platform that doesn’t bar overclocking from even taking place (looking at you, Xeon).