- Have you had a look at
your motherboard lately? Even though the CPU is arguably your PC's most important component, it still has about as
much space dedicated to it as it did in 1993. I mean, the entire CPU
package is only about the size of a couple of postage stamps,
which raises the question. If they wanted an edge
over their competitor, why don't Intel or AMD just
make their CPUs bigger? Imagine how many cores and how much performance we could have if we had a CPU the size
of a grilled cheese. Or am I missing something here? To answer, we reached out to our friends Matthew Hurwitz at AMD
and Ben Benson at Intel, and we'd like to thank both
of them for their insights. One easy way to conceptualize
this is thinking about how a car engine works. Even in a smaller car, you could theoretically
throw in a high performance, 10-cylinder engine
instead of the responsible four-banger that carries
you to your cubicle job. But obviously, a 10-cylinder
engine costs a lot more to manufacture than an inline four. And even though CPUs are far
smaller than car engines, adding more transistors
isn't exactly cheap. Not to mention that if
you make the chips bigger, the manufacturers get fewer
CPUs per silicon wafer, driving up the cost of each one. Additionally, a larger die means that there's a higher chance
of a given CPU being defective. CPU fabrication is a very complex process and not every one of those
slices we just showed you is going to be usable. In fact, a significant
proportion of CPUs are discarded at the factory because
of very small defects that can hurt performance or
even make the chip unusable. So manufacturers don't want
to add even more complexity that will push their yields
of sellable chips down, hurting their margins. But even if yields were close to 100%, it still doesn't make a ton
of sense for manufacturers to make a larger die. You see, it's actually very difficult to produce a large CPU with tons of cores that run at the same clock speed as a CPU that has fewer cores and is smaller. Not only do you need to
contend with more heat, it can also harm performance because at the clock
speeds of modern CPUs, even a few extra centimeters
can make it difficult to keep everything in sync, forcing you to run at lower clocks. This is especially true if you're trying to support
that extra processing power with additional cache memory. This is part of the reason that if you've ever looked up the specs for high core count CPUs, you'll have noticed that
the clock frequencies are generally lower than they
are for more mainstream chips. Similarly to how WiFi is a trade-off between speed and range, CPU design is a trade-off
between speed and die size, or more specifically, core count. So instead of trying to
make the largest CPUs with the most transistors,
manufacturers instead, think about how the processor
is actually going to be used and optimize for that. Because a huge CPU die would have to run at a lower clock speed, it might not be as good for
an application like gaming, where trying to get fast
performance in a single thread is generally the best way to go. Additionally, simply
brute forcing performance by adding more transistors doesn't always yield
the best results anyway. Instead, the architecture
of a CPU can be adjusted with specific use cases in mind, such as Quick Sync
Video on Intel platforms to help with transcoding, or AMD's inclusion of PCI Express Gen 4 to enable super high speed storage. So remember that bigger
isn't always better, and besides if they made
CPU packages super huge, where would you put all that sweet RGB? Speaking of, where would
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