So my question is this, if all modern day computer CPUs (central processing units) more or less have the same or similar clockspeeds from generation to generation as of late, and all run on a 64 bit architecture with an x86 instruction set, what about the processor is being altered or changed to yield performance gains from one gen to the next?
I understand that more cache is available, and transistor sizes are getting smaller and smaller, but at the end of the day, it is still running an x86 instruction set at 64 bits.
So last gens 4 core 4.5 GHz processor should run identically as quickly as a current gen 4 core 4.5 GHz processor theoretically – but that is not the case.
In: Technology
The way in which one CPU model can be faster than another while having the same architecture and running the same program at the same clock frequency is by several clever tricks: 1. Running several instructions at the same time, 2. Using statistics to predict the outcome of troublesome ‘branch’ instructions that usually halt execution completely, 3. Introduce more cores, effectively allowing several programs to run simultaneously, side by side (or many copies of the same program), 4. Having larger on die memory caches for instructions and intermediate calculations, 5. Having faster memory bus speed to allow for faster memory access.
Latest Answers