so you are shopping for a new CPU and you wanted to have six, eight, ten, twelve
cores! But, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on! The first thing to figure out is how
many CPU cores you use now for your most intense video games or video editing
apps. In this way, the multi-core CPU you get is not just for bragging rights, but
rather, is the exact CPU you need. All right! As we know, we get straight to the
point. The main way to do this is by using the Task Manager. To open it,
you're going to right-click an empty spot from a taskbar and then select
Task Manager. Now click the performance tab and then click the CPU
section. By default, you should see this view with the name of your current
processor on top. Now this current view shows you the overall usage of your CPU
as a whole but it does not tell you how each individual core is being used. To do
that, you're going to right-click anywhere in
this area and then you're going to hover the cursor to where it says Change graph to and then
select Logical processors. And Bam! Look what we have here! Okay, so, what do all of
these boxes mean? Well, they represent your CPU cores. If you go to the bottom,
it gives you more info. As you can see in my case, for the Intel Core i7 4790, it
has a total of 4 CPU cores and 8 logical processors. Now logical processors, as
discussed in the last video, have to do with the concept of hyper threading, where
one CPU core behaves like two CPU cores. So, this is why in my case, instead of
showing four boxes for four CPU cores, it shows a total of eight. If you don't
have hyper threading, but have a four core CPU you'd see exactly four boxes.
If you have a six core CPU, you would see exactly the six boxes.
but if you have hyper threading, you'd see twice the amount
of boxes as your CPU cores. All right! Now for the fun part! let's start testing and
let's see how each app uses these CPU core differently. The first app I'm going to
use is Adobe Illustrator, and I'm going to open a very, very, very big vector file.
I'm going to convert that file into a regular image. I'm going to rasterize
it and this is going to use quite a bit of resources, because it has a resolution
of 15360 by eight 8640!
Now let's rasterize it and see how it will show up in each individual CPU
core from the task manager. When you are using the task manager to monitor
how many CPU cores an app is using, pay attention to the last part or the end of
the graphs. After about five seconds, you will start seeing the differences in
usage. So after about 20 to 30 seconds, you should have a pretty good idea of how
many CPU cores that app uses. S,o as you can see, in my case here,
Adobe Illustrator primarily uses the second CPU core. With this information,
now we can make more reasonable buying choices. Let's say for example you
primarily use your computer for Adobe Illustrator and then you end up buying a
computer with even more CPU cores, will that necessarily help your performance?
Maybe, but not by much. For example if you have a standard mechanical hard drive or
not enough RAM, perhaps getting an SSD or even more RAM would really help you. All
right now! let's take things even further! let's render a video using Adobe After
Effects. Okay, now let me add it to the Adobe Media encoder queue.
Now let me start encoding. All right! Here are the results! As you can see, for the
most part, Adobe After Effects is using pretty much all of the processor cores.
That makes sense because encoding and rendering really, really depends on the
CPU. So what can we learn from all of this? Clearly, it's not all about the CPU
cores. It depends on what you're doing. But, of course, you cannot go wrong if you
get a decent high-end processor. If you have any ideas or any suggestions when
buying a new CPU, please post them on the comments below.
Definitely, for more easy simple straightforward tech videos like this,
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