Kerr Avon wrote:I was just looking at the latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey report at https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/70022-quad- … s- […]
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I was just looking at the latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey report at https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/70022-quad- … s-10-reign.html, and it lists the 'physical' CPUs used by Steam users. But to me the list seems to represent the cores of the CPUs used by gamers, not the number of separate CPUs used by any given user, so surely the list should say "CPU Cores", as no matter how many cores a single CPU has, it's still only one physical CPU? Is the "Physical CPUs" heading wrong, or do some people really refer to each separate core as a physical CPU?
When looking at the table, one can see that the single and triple cores are very very low and dual and quad are almost 100% when combined.
This is most likely due to them being cores and not physical CPUs.
A Q6600 is not 4 CPUs, but a quad core CPU. Steam probably left it this way, as it's not hard to understand what the table actually meant for the vast portion of users using this table...even though imo it's incorrect when designating cores as physical CPUs.
Otoh (and this is where Jo22 was getting at I think), a core is in fact a physical core, and not (say) "emulated" like hyperthreading cores are?
Personally I would've prefered them calling it "CPU cores" instead of just CPUs.
edit: I do find it odd that there's so few hexa and octo cores?
edit2: Actually...as I'm thinking about this, I'm starting to have some doubts about what I mentioned, it does seem logical to call the separate cores a "CPU", as it basically is multiple dies on a single chip.
Central Processing Unit...
But still...what would Steam call the real physical chips in the above table? I still think it's easier to distinguish between Dual-core dual-CPU and quad-core single-CPU, as "core" in this context also refers to the die area which makes up the transistors of the CPU.