Reason for four cores?

[neyakaw]

Hello,pls what's the reason for four cores in an i7 processor?

 

[4745454b]

To make it faster running applications?

 

[dalauder]

i7's have 8 threads--4 course and 4 "virtual" cores. This is called Hyper-threading and is explained in a Wikipedia entry of the same name.

More cores/threads allow for faster performance of tasks that can use multiple threads (multi-threaded applications). They also perform multitasking better. I can tell a solid performance gain between my Q9400 OC'd to 3.2GHz at work and my i7-930 Oc'd to 3.8GHz at home when running several intensive tasks.

That said, 4 cores is easily noticeable as better than two and 8 threads is overkill.

 

[Toxxyc]

It completely depends on your application. For hardcore gaming 4 threads is fine, but for intense processing with multipile apps requiring multipile threads more cores/threads are better. For this reason the Xeon processors (12 cores) are better for servers with many services running at any given time, and a 4-core with more speed per core is better for gaming, as you have more "oomph" at every core.

It's a difficult thing to put into words in a short paragraph. Please don't make me put it into words again.

 

[cadder]

It depends on what you are running, and having 8 tabs open in your browser is NO multitasking.
Some games, some video encoding apps, some rendering apps will make use of more than one core. They will spread the load among multiple cores so the work gets done faster. Some apps will use only one core no matter how many you have open. Toms has done tests with some games to see how many cores would make a difference, and they discovered that a lot of common game see a speedup with 3 cores, but then going from 3 to 4 doesn't gain much.

Now something that I notice with my own computers- if I have things running such as a virus scan, background plotting, copying files, downloading files, I can continue to operate whatever else I am interacting with and not see a slowdown when using my machine with a quad core. But when doing this on my machine that has a dual core at 3.8GHz, I can see a slowdown.