At 8:50 PM -0700 10/24/2010, Joshua Juran wrote:
The Core 2 Duo was a real performance boost comparted to the PowerPC G4 which
was stuck at 1.5 GHz. I know, witch third party CPU upgrades 2 GHz
is possible
without overclocking - altough I'm not sure if they aren't overclocked by
default?
My recollection from the WWDC 2006 presentation is that multiple
cores have gone mainstream as an alternative to increasing clock
speed.
I always liked that POV; a good rationalization. The reality is a
bit more complicated, and had nothing to do with clock speed.
Realize that clock speed loses much of its meaning when you consider
pipelining and parallelism within the processor. The general public
never really understood that, tho, due to the players using clock
speed as the big marketing metric. Then it was made more complicated
by certain companies advertising their computer's speed by adding all
the clock speeds of each processor! Yea, my car does 240mph on the
big highway because it has four wheels!
The BIG push for multi-core processors was by the US Gov't -- tech's
biggest customer. Uncle needs 'em for, um, certain types of big, um,
vector type calculations.
After some tech failures, Moore's Law was upheld. Big big gains were
made toward reducing the size of the gates on the chips, which in
turn meant that chips could be smaller, use less power, and produce
less heat. But smaller chips presented packaging problems! So if
you keep the chips big, what do you do with the extra real estate????
You make ASICs and SoC and, oh, just put more Stuff on it... More
cache, memory controllers, and all sorts of auxiliary processors!
Cores!
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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