In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.
In this installment we’ll be looking at something everyone has in their computer, a Central Processing Unit, better known by its abbreviation as the CPU.
In the last article written about this on PCMech (which was a really long time ago), microprocessors were discussed up to the 386, so we’ll start from the 486 to present.
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Another thing to mention is that CPU speed of operation is limited by frequency: Go above a certain amount of gigahertz and you’re getting too close to microwave frequencies. At these extremely high frequencies a combination of things start to happen:
The higher the frequency the smaller the antenna needed to radiate that frequency. That’s the reason why the highest frequencies outside of any chip on the motherboard are generally limited to megahertz: If they were any higher, the connective tracks on or between the layers of the motherboard would radiate the power away as radio-waves before it ever reached the next component. If the in-chip frequencies became too high then even the connections inside the chip would act as antennae and the chip itself would cease to function, regardless of the design of the transistors themselves.
Secondly; what happens when you put a dinner into a microwave oven? It cooks, yes?: What’s happening is that the high-frequency microwaves of several gigahertz are bombarding the food and exciting the (water) molecules to vibrate sympathetically, causing them to heat up. (I think the frequency used is 5 point something gigahertz.)
The above example of food heating is a secondary effect on something near the source of microwave emission, rather than the source itself.
When you’re talking gigahertz; the higher the frequency (The more gigahertz.) the greater the heat generated. Go figure. The cost of fabricating a chip small enough to function at these frequencies around 5GHz, as well as the cooling system it would require, doesn’t even bear thinking about: It’s just totally impractical.
So once you’re getting above around 4+GHz frequency you’re starting to fight a losing battle. Logically if you can’t go upwards you go outwards. Think outside the box like AMD did: Add another core operating at an identical frequency on the same die and you theorhetically and loosely have twice the frequency without having to have twice the frequency, if you catch my drift?
(In actual fact it’s not quite that simple: The overall performance gain works out at somewhere just above 1.7 times rather than double; but I’m not going to type a load of complex calculus-laden quantumlinear algorithms here to prove a point, even if I could remember them.)
Finally; correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the Intel Core2 series initially produced in 2007?