Too Many Cores?

I wanted to write in response to Jarred Walton’s article, “AMD Ryzen 9 3950X,” January 2020, where he mentioned the state of computing. I have an Acer notebook from 2014 that does the computing I wish to do. Granted, it “is for typing articles and minor image editing,” but at this time, I don’t need anything more powerful. Whether I will need a 16- core processor anytime soon is debatable. One can never tell when my notebook decides to

“go south”! I consider myself to be a computer experimenter, but $750 is out of my price- paying ability. I would really enjoy having such a processor, and am sure I could use it for machine learning and other artificial intelligence work, rather than for gaming, as an Intel Core i9 outshines even this

high- end second- gen 3000 series processor.

– Murray McCullough EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ALAN

DEXTER, RESPONDS: It’s fair to say that the likes of the Ryzen 9 3950X are absolutely overkill for most normal computing tasks, but that isn’t really what it’s for. As the price suggests, this is a serious chip for serious applications.

And as we move over to systems having more cores, developers should start to use them more and more— so it shouldn’t just be rendering and video editing that makes use of all those cores. As for gaming, it’s true that Intel has the edge here, but if you’re dropping this much cash on a processor, you’re probably gaming at higher resolutions, in which case, that edge gets very slim indeed. So, while we agree that this is a chip more for tomorrow than for today’s computing, if you’re building a machine to last for years, it should be on your wishlist.