Threads vs frequency...

[Earle Kelley]

What is better in a CPU for general office applications: Ability to handle more threads or higher frequency (bas speed)?

[debs3759]

Most office apps don't do multi-threading, so less threads and higher frequency will be best, unless you run several apps together.

[henriok]

For general office-applications, the bottleneck would probably the the hard drive.. so use a SSD.

[mavroxur]

[henriok]

Everything touches the disk, everything. Surfing, opening files, saving files, starting applications, running applications, booting, just keeping the operating system running. Everything.

No-one notices the difference between a new 1.6 GHz or a 3.6 GHz processor doing most low CPU intensive tasks. Especially since new Intel processors have a really nifty way of instantly overclocking for quick single threaded tasks. The only time you notice when the CPU is the bottleneck is when you are doing CPU intensive tasks like coding movies, playing games or rendering 3D scenes. Or doing benchmark tests.

Everyone notices the swap from hard drives to SSDs, regardless of CPU speed.

But.. to answer the question: singel threaded performance is best for office apps.
But then again, if you are trying to make a computer actually run faster, don't worry too much about the CPU, buy an SSD.

[mavroxur]

You're completely off the original subject. The poster asked which was better for office applications, fewer faster cores, or more slower cores. The answer was fewer faster cores. I'm not sure why "get an SSD" was ever thrown in. That's like asking what's a better paint for a fence, and telling him to go buy some rosebushes to plant in front of the fence. However, to entertain your argument, I'll go along -



Touching the disk and performing heavy IO are two entirely different things. How much IO do you think you have while browsing the internet or opening MS Office? Not a lot. With a relatively shallow queue depth on a hard drive and an SSD, light IO won't feel much different on an SSD or a typical hard drive. A typical office application doesn't perform heavy IO (either in sequential reads, or IOPs). So, office opens 0.5 seconds faster with an SSD (down from <2 seconds for Word 2013 on an i5) Faster? ...Um...yeah. And it's *almost* measurable. And, no, you don't only notice a difference between a slow CPU (e.g. an Atom or Celeron) and a fast CPU (i5 or i7) when doing CPU intensive tasks. If you've been around computers at all, you can tell the difference doing ANYTHING. Launching an application? Guess what, you're executing code, and usually multiple threads (support libraries, runtimes, etc). I don't care what SSD you have, an Atom or Celeron with an SSD won't feel anything like an i5 with a nice 7200rpm disk. It'll feel like crap. You can strap nitrous onto a Yugo, and guess what, you still have a Yugo. You can throw all the IOPs and read/write data speed you want at a crap CPU, it'll still be a crap CPU. I manage an enterprise network with about 90 servers, 8 SANs, and about 1,700 workstations. Do I quote workstations to departments with a Celeron and an SSD? Absolutely not. Ever. Why? Because that makes no sense. In an office environment, an i5 with a good, snappy 7200rpm drive (32MB cache) will perform terrifically for typical office usage. Boot times, and inital launches of applications may be faster with an SSD, but in an office type environment, the cost per GB versus performance gain doesn't justify it.