Ive recently been looking at a new graphics card for my gaming computer, and I see a lot of statistics like “1650 boost clock speed ,” But I don’t understand why the manufacturer wouldn’t just set the performance comparative to begin with?
In: Technology
In the CPU case it’s usually a power constraint. There’s a certain amount of power and dissipated heat a CPU can go through, and if a multi-core chip is mostly idle but has one program (technically, one thread) doing lots of simple instructions like adding two numbers together it can ramp up the speed while maintaining the same power limit. But if all cores are firing, or if some cores are doing complex instructions like adding sets of 16 numbers at a time (using technology like AVX) the power limit can be reached at lower clocks, so the boost clock can neither be guaranteed nor sustained. It’s basically opportunistic overclocking.
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