Originally Posted by
madcho
No, I don't.
I am electronic engineer, and I understand well the path they took to do this.
They increase base clock with temperature/power limits and sensors, maybe internal electronic noise or delays too.
They use an built in microcontroler for doing that, they have implemented some advanced/fancy profiles.
Same principle with throttle function, when temperature/power is too high, they drop frequency under base clock. It was done a lot in Pentium 4. The problem that intel was sued for selling processors that can't keep up with base frequency.
They done different after that with a new way and they called it "Turbo". Base clock is lower, and Turbo clock aren't garanted ...
Today real average frequency now is more and more about dependent on process, and even mobo design.
Yeah mobo design is still important now, less and less off course, but when it was old time of pentium 4, the power stage that drived the hungry beast wasn't as efficient as today. A lot of heat from the power stage for the CPU, warm up air close to the CPU, and reduced the processor cooling performance.
Power stages are much more efficient today. However on a mobo, the CPU socket placement is still important today. The path of the air affect cooling performances, and so the real average clock.
On first generations with turbo it was around 1 to 5 seconds. Now it's maybe better, not because technique is improved, but because
1/ much more cores in the CPUs, so just one core at turbo can last long, full cores on turbo (with a cpu burn tool) it will never last long of course. Yeah they designed the base clock based on full cores without throttle and a small margin. It's obvious that if that could do better with all cores they would have did it on base clock ...
2/ process is a lot improved, helps a lot on thermal. Core are smaller and smaller with a lot of dark silicon. Easier to dissipate more with dark silicon, you just surround the cores with dark silicon.
3/ architecture improvements; with reduced base clock for same performances (better IPC), means less dynamic power consumption means cooler CPU. By More the frequency is far from the invicible wall of 5ghz clock, more it's "easy" to get large turbo clocks.
4/ Improvements in data transmission on the chip. New technologies came since first pentium. serials links with differentials pairs are everywhere now. It's easier to improve clock when the full chip is not going at the same clock, but every block has it's own clock domain. Much easier to synchronize.
Maybe some parts aren't totally exact, it's difficult to have real technical data on this. You can bet it's garded like a graal in companies.
If you find a processor that can keep up over 10 minutes with all cores at turbo frequency, (base clock is not very low and there is not a plane fan in front of it), I would be chock. It's just thermal electronics. It's same on a 0 to 5W processors (what I work with), than 100W. the math isn't different.
And off course I would be interested to read deep test on what it has become today, if there is any.
Bookmarks