So this is probably really stupid, but why, for a company such as AMD, cant they make a CPU similar to the 3970x but with 8 or so big cores with improved performance? I keep seeing insane core counts from them, but I don’t quite get why they can’t make really good single-core performance.
In: Technology
We are at the point where a single CPU core can’t really get significantly better without also producing so much heat as to basically vaporize itself – heat production being *very* nonlinear with performance – remember that for extreme overclocking to 6GHz and above people have to constantly dump liquid nitrogen on CPUs as it boils off. We need to invent new materials/technologies to step forward.
On the other hand getting a bunch of cores and dumping them on one chip is a lot easier and results in actual tangible performance improvement, with *much* less heat output increase than trying to get the same processing power into one core.
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