Darron also works with a number of our clients as their CIO to provide them with his unique blend of technical and commercial expertise. As a keen golfer, he's often found on the golf course at the weekend, we think Victoria has enough of him in the office during the week! There are a couple of commercial changes coming to Microsoft that you need to be aware of and prepare early for.
All Rights Reserved. Company Reg No NI Is More Always Better? What is a multi-core processor? Clock speeds A high clock speed means faster processor. How does it relate to business? Previous Post. Next Post. Popular CMI Blog. Major commercial changes to Microsoft The X pushes the speed up to 3. Now compare the X 2. For single-threaded tasks this is a problem but if your requirements are to deliver large amounts of aggregate CPU power to a distributed processing cluster or a virtualization cluster then this is a reasonable approach.
The trend will continue for a while but there are challenges and continually scaling out the number of cores is not easy keeping memory bandwidth high enough and managing caches gets much harder as the number of cores grows. That means that the current fairly explosive growth in the number of cores per socket will have to slow down in a couple of generations and we will see some other approach.
The problem being, is that you need to be working on a bunch of instructions at once, current x86 cpu have 80 or more instructions being worked on at once, and it seems that is the limit, as it was hit with the P4, heck, the Pentium Pro did 40 in Typical instruction streams are not predictable beyond that you have to guess branches, memory access, etc to make execute more than a few instructions at once did 5, Pentium did 10, barely.
So while you can make them wider more functional units to do each piece of the instruction , longer deeper pipelines to hide latency , it doesn't seem to do much good.
And we seem to have hit a wall with clock speed as well. And we are still outrunning memory. So splitting into many cpu seems to be a win. Plus, they can share caches. There is quite a bit more to this, but it boils down to conventional programs cannot be run significantly faster on any hardware we can imagine how to design and build. Now if predictability isn't a problem, for example, many scientific problems and graphics they often boil down to multiply this set of numbers by that set of numbers , this isn't the case, and thus the popularity of Intel's IA64 Itanium and GPUs, that just keep getting faster, but they will not help you run Word any better.
About the physical architecture multi-core processors instead of multiple single-core ones But I'm quite sure this has something to do with motherboards with a single CPU socket being a lot easier to design and manufacture than boards with multiple ones.
In order to increase clock speeds, the silicon transistors on the chip need to be able to switch faster. These higher speeds require higher input voltages and semiconductor manufacturing processes that result in greater leakage , both of which increase power consumption and heat output.
You eventually reach a point where you cannot increase clock rates any further without requiring excessive amounts of power or using exotic cooling solutions. To illustrate this problem, I'll compare two modern AMD processors. The FX, which is based on the same die, runs at a maximum of 4. Browse All News Articles. Smart TVs Ads. Team Comes to Workplace by Meta. Block People Spotify. Verizon Selling PS5. Windows 11 SE Explained. Windows 11 SE. Microsoft Default Browser Firefox.
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Protect Windows 10 From Internet Explorer. Mozilla Fights Double Standard. Connect to a Hidden Wi-Fi Network. Change the Size of the Touch Keyboard. The benefit of having multiple cores is that the system can handle more than one thread simultaneously. Each core can handle a separate stream of data. This architecture greatly increases the performance of a system that is running concurrent applications. Since servers tend to run many concurrent applications at a given time, the technology was originally developed for the enterprise customer — but as personal computers got more complex and multitasking increased, they too benefited from having extra cores.
Every process, however, is governed by a primary thread that can only occupy a single core. Thus, the relative speed of a program like a game or a video renderer is hard-limited to the capability of the core that the primary thread consumes. The primary thread can absolutely delegate secondary threads to other cores — but a game doesn't become twice as fast when you double the cores. Thus, it's not unusual for a game to fully max one core the primary thread but see only partial utilization of other cores for secondary threads.
No amount of core-doubling gets around the fact that the primary core is a rate limiter for your application, and apps that are sensitive to this architecture will perform better than apps that aren't. While the concept of multiple-core processors sounds appealing, there is a major caveat to this technology. For the true benefits of the multiple processors to be enjoyed, the software running on the computer must be written to support multithreading.
Without the software supporting such a feature, threads will be primarily run through a single core thus degrading the computer's overall efficiency. After all, if it can only run on a single core in a quad-core processor, it may actually be faster to run it on a dual-core processor with higher base clock speeds.
All of the major current operating systems support multithreading capability. But the multithreading must also be written into the application software. The support for multithreading in consumer software has improved over the years but for many simple programs, multithreading support is still not implemented due to the complexity of the software build.
For example, a mail program or web browser is not likely to see huge benefits to multithreading as much as a graphics or video editing program would, where the computer processes complex calculations. A good example to explain this tendency is to look at a typical computer game. Most games require some form of rendering engine to display what is happening in the game. In addition, some sort of artificial intelligence controls events and characters in the game.
With a single-core, both tasks execute by switching between them. This approach is not efficient. If the system featured multiple processors, the rendering and AI could each run on a separate core—an ideal situation for a multiple-core processor.
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