There's nothing "rare" and "very specific" about parallel processing, what's "rare, very specific" is the amount of software that's been rewritten/redesigned to take advantage of it so far. Sure, there are inherently-serial workloads, but most of what we use our machines for isn't like that. Parallel processing is not just about performance either but also general stability, a many-core processor can run a lot cooler and be a lot less fiddly than a high-end CPU core that packs the same amount of compute performance in a single CPU thread!
>There's nothing "rare" and "very specific" about parallel processing, what's "rare, very specific" is the amount of software that's been rewritten/redesigned to take advantage of it so far.
People have been banging their heads against the 'rewrite this software to take advantage of multiple cores' wall for decades. The lack of progress is telling. For a straightforward example, look at the second half of this Factorio update blog: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215
Factorio is a sim game that you would think on first consideration would hugely benefit from a multithreaded design. It turns out that doing so is actually slower(!). And although this example is pulled from a game, it is essentially the same story again and again, no matter what the subject.
Now consider the second half of your statement- that the main benefit of multi-core processing is that it provides more CPUs, so that if any one gets choked, the general environment continues to operate.
(Which is true, and a great advantage of having a multi-core CPU.)
But consider a little deeper, too. If the first, best defense we have regarding multi-core designs is that they are simply more single-cores to have on hand, what does that say about the relative value of parallel processing vs. single-thread performance? Inherently serial workloads dominate across the board, in every field. The few parallel problems we have, we have because people have put a lot of brain sweat in to figuring out what, exactly, we can even do with all these cores lying around.
Meanwhile, there are entire classes of problems that are simply waiting for better single-thread performance before we can move ahead.
This is a very real problem, and it isn't going away.
There aren't that many benefits for super high core counts in your average enthusiasts use cases. Even games don't benefit from higher core count as much as you would expect.
The people who would benefit from more cores have the server specific lines of CPUs to choose from, so that makes consumer grade CPUs a compromise between core count and single core performance.
> Even games don't benefit from higher core count as much as you would expect.
And some games (like some Source-engine titles) crash if you have a high core count.
I certainly benefit from the higher core count because I usually have a VM, 40 browser tabs, Slack, and a bunch of other stuff open at any given time, but my parents would see no benefit with their 5 tabs + iTunes + Word usage.
I have been running 4 players with one of the most taxing modpacks on a mid tier digital ocean VPS with no hitches. Not many players I guess but in case you were curious if you could use a VPS. Even when we had multiple excavators sending thousands of entities through sorting pipelines it was stil doing surprisingly well.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into whether a VPS is viable, but we often have poor internet at our LAN parties and get the best experience when the server is local.
It's a vanilla server and I also get around 4 players. The real problem occurs when people are generating new terrain while flying on an elytra, sometimes causing the server to crash altogether. When not exploring, it will frequently report "Can't keep up!" messages even when hanging around spawn, which I think might be due to the truly insane amount of hoppers we have (although haven't seen this as much in the recent update).
If you're curious, the CPU is a i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz. The game is certainly playable, but it struggles under load like I described.
A max size reactor in minecraft consists of 50000 Tileentities and it only produces a few million RF/t enough to power a handful of max tier void miners. Thousands isn't exactly impressive.
Well we had a max size reactor powering our excavators so I guess we had those entities too. I didn't realise it took so many entities to run. Not to mention the hundreds of other pieces in our worlds automation puzzle and it was all spread out quite far apart, with chunk loaders maintaining the networks presence. Things were routed, crushed, smelted, crafted and eventually stored or utilized, all automatically.