7-Zip for Windows can now use more than 64 CPU threads for compression

Post by dikei » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #37

dikei wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ZSTD a ton in my programming work where efficiency matters. But for sharing files with other people, ZIP is still king. Even 7z or RAR is niche. Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger.

> Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger. You can use ZSTD with ZIP files too! It's compression method 93 (see https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT which is the official ZIP file specification). Which reveals that "everyone can open a ZIP file" is a lie. Sure, everyone can open a ZIP file, as long as that file uses only a limited subset of the Z…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #40

zamadatix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And x86 arguably didn't ship >64 hardware thread systems until then because NT didn't support it. If that were the case the above system wouldn't have needed 8 sockets. With NUMA systems the app needs to be scheduling group aware anyways. The difference here really appears when you have a single socket with more than 64 hardware threads, which took until ~2019 for x86.

There were single image systems with hundreds of cores in the late 90s and thousands of cores in the early 2000s. I absolutely stand by the fact that Intel and AMD didn't pursue high core count systems until that point because they were so focused on single core perf, in part because Windows didn't support high core counts. The end of Denmark scing forced their hand and Microsoft's processor group hack.

Post by zamadatix » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 11:59 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #40

zamadatix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And x86 arguably didn't ship >64 hardware thread systems until then because NT didn't support it. If that were the case the above system wouldn't have needed 8 sockets. With NUMA systems the app needs to be scheduling group aware anyways. The difference here really appears when you have a single socket with more than 64 hardware threads, which took until ~2019 for x86.

There were single image systems with hundreds of cores in the late 90s and thousands of cores in the early 2000s. I absolutely stand by the fact that Intel and AMD didn't pursue high core count systems until that point because they were so focused on single core perf, in part because Windows didn't support high core counts. The end of Denmark scing forced their hand and Microsoft's processor group hack.

Post by guappa » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:09 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #37

dikei wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ZSTD a ton in my programming work where efficiency matters. But for sharing files with other people, ZIP is still king. Even 7z or RAR is niche. Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger.

> Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger. You can use ZSTD with ZIP files too! It's compression method 93 (see https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT which is the official ZIP file specification). Which reveals that "everyone can open a ZIP file" is a lie. Sure, everyone can open a ZIP file, as long as that file uses only a limited subset of the Z…

Post by monocasa » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:14 PM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #46

monocasa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were single image systems with hundreds of cores in the late 90s and thousands of cores in the early 2000s. I absolutely stand by the fact that Intel and AMD didn't pursue high core count systems until that point because they were so focused on single core perf, in part because Windows didn't support high core counts. The end of Denmark scing forced their hand and Microsoft's processor group hack.

AMD and Intel were focused on single core performance, because personal desktop computing was the bigger business until around mid to late 2000s. Single core performance is really important for client computing.