WilkerCSBD Posted May 15, 2021 Posted May 15, 2021 Since the Dennard scaling broke in the mid-2000s that the advancement in CPUs stopped being based on clock speed to be based on multicore designs and generation after generation we have seen how the number of cores has evolved, but , Is there an ideal in the number of processors? First of all we must clarify that this article is not about what physically limits the number of cores of a processor, but about whether there is a configuration that, regardless of this limit, which could be the ideal and therefore with which the designers and chipmakers are more comfortable. Is 8 the ideal number of large nuclei? CPU Reverse Render One of the changes that we are going to see is the adoption of heterogeneous configurations in PC CPUs, something that we know in the face of the Intel Alder Lake architecture and that is rumored for future processors from AMD. Which means that the number of cores will be increased, but cores of the same complexity will not be added, but much simpler. There are two reasons why these little cores can be added. On the one hand, they take care of the simplest instructions, for which the more complex CPU cores do not have an advantage in speed, but they do have a disadvantage in the energy consumption of each instruction. On the other hand, there are execution threads or processes of the different programs that are sent to one type of kernel or another. The adoption of this strategy in the future by Intel and AMD hides a clear message, the fact that we will not see a leap beyond 8 cores as the standard size of CPUs for PCs. It is clear that it will be possible to buy configurations with a greater number of cores, we have the case of the future Intel Alder Lake where the measurement of "large" cores is 8. Small versus multi-threaded cores big.LITTLE Diagram Multithreading in any type of processor is based on using the dead times or the execution bubbles of a processor to execute a completely independent thread of the first one. Just because an x-core CPU runs 2x threads doesn't mean it runs twice as fast. Multi-threaded CPUs are seen as additional cores in the eyes of the operating system. It would be physically possible to increase the number of threads of execution of a CPU core, but these depend on the bubbles created by the previous threads of execution. That is why it is much more efficient to add more cores of lower power than to increase the number of threads. As the number of small cores may increase in the coming years, it is not for nothing that operating systems and programs today are composed not of a single thread of execution, but of dozens of smaller ones that can be executed. easily in those little cores. Which are going to grow more and more.
Recommended Posts