Too many cores break games?!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Too many cores break games?!

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Jake Blues posted:

This will sound absolutely stupid, but how is it possible for a CPU to have 32 cores and only output ~4gHz?

The clock speed is a measure of how fast the transistors are cycling, it isn't a measurement of performance and doesn't get added up between CPU cores. A 4Ghz quad-core CPU has four cores that each cycle up to four billion times per second. In order to translate clockspeed into performance you need to know how much work the CPU does each clock cycle (this measurement is called IPC, or Instructions Per Clock), which depends on the design of the CPU and the specific job it is working on. For example, AMD CPUs tend to do significantly less work on average per clock cycle than Intel processors, so a 4Ghz AMD CPU will be significantly slower than a 4Ghz Intel CPU. This is an average however, so while AMD CPUs tend to be particularly bad at gaming, there are some workloads where they can even be faster than Intel CPUs. You can't usually add up performance for each core to get a total, because most applications usually aren't able to use all available cores.

An additional complication is that higher-end Intel CPUs use a technology called HyperThreading that allows each CPU core to work on two tasks at once, appearing as two cores to Windows. This improves performance by about 10%, as the core can immediately begin working on the other task as soon as the first has to pause to wait for data for example. Overall, this means that a system with 32 cores in Windows probably has two CPU sockets with 8 physical cores each, but appearing as 16 logical cores each to Windows.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2015 20:35

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 19:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Too many cores break games?!