this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Only -231 degrees required, nice.
Is clock speed a thing anymore rather than cores?
As far as I know, clock speed is still pretty nice to have, but chip development has shifted towards adding multiple cores because it basically became technologically impossible to continue increasing clock speeds.
A nice fun fact: if you consider how fast electricity travels in silicium, it turns out that for a clock that pulses in the tens of billions of times per second (which is what gigahertz are), it is physically impossible for each pulse to get all the way across a 2cm die before the next pulse starts. This is exacerbated by the fact that a processor has many meandering paths throughout and is not a straight line.
So at any given moment, there are several clock cycles traveling throughout a modern processor at the same time, and the designers have to just "come up" with a solution that makes that work, nevermind the fact that almost all the digital logic design tools are not built to account for this, so instead they end up having to use analog (as in audio chips, not as in pen-and-paper design) design tools.
Signals don't have to make it across the whole die each clock pulse. They just have to make it to the next register in their pipeline/data path, and timing tools for that absolutely exist. They treat it as analog because the signals themselves are analog and chips must account for things like the time it takes for a signal to go from a 0 to a 1 (or vice versa), as well as the time it takes to "charge" a flip flop so that it registers the signal change and holds it stable for the next stage of the pipeline.
Depends on what you are doing.
Gaming you want speed.
rendering, you want cores.
as a typical rule of thumb, since games will always be limited to the number of threads they use, and rendering/compiling/etc typically uses everything it can get.
And CPUs with higher core counts tend to have lower clock speeds per core, leading to games sometimes running much better on mid-range hardware than on the latest and greatest.
Yeah i forgot to mention that. thanks for picking up my slack.
More cores > more heat > less speed per core to manage the heat.
Less cores > less overall heat > more speed per core.
Which is why, generally, a 5600 is better for gaming than a 5950.
the 3d cache chips throw a minor wrench into things though, as the extra and faster cache can help compensate for lower speeds, which makes the 5800x3d generally a better gaming chip than the 5600, despite lower speeds.
Games are optimized for multiple cores to a much higher degree than they used to. Single core games are uncommon, even on the indie scene.
They were held back for a long time by console hardware, but that's not a problem anymore.
Would be interestng what in a superconducting (-271°C?) CPU happens. At least leakage due to tunneling effects should be reduced at -231°C.
Thank fuck it wasnt kelvin!