Why can’t we just pack more and more ALUs in a CPU to increase processing throughput instead of increasing clockspeeds? Wouldn’t the gain be just as significant?
In: Engineering
Same reason why 9 pregnant women can’t make a baby in 1 month.
Say you want to tell a CPU to calculate this expression: **(2 * 3) + (5 * 6)**
That’s 3 operations, so if you have 1 ALU this would take 3 steps, but if you have 2 ALUs you can compute **2 * 3** and **5 * 6** at the same time, and finish it in 2 steps.
BUT, if you increased ALU count to 3, you’d still need 2 steps to finish the calculation, because the 3rd step requires the results of the first two.
Alternatively, if you had something that can be computed in parallel, then you’d write multithreaded code to take advantage of multiple cores, or GPUs which have even more cores.
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