Multi core Processors

Since half the forum most likely believes that you can get 12GhZ processing power from anything quad core with 3GhZ, I thought I would do a little lesson on multi core processors. Quad-core processors are split up into 4 cores YES, however the processing frequency for example lets take the core i7 740QM 1.73GhZ stock this is not 1.73GhZ on all cores, this is 1.73Ghz / 4 meaning each core has 432.5 MhZ of processing power, the idea of multi core processors is that instead of 1 core trying to do all of the work by itself its faster for 4 smaller cores with the same total frequency to do the work faster by sharing the work load. The true advantage multi core processors only comes in to play when software is written linearly so that multi cores can take advantage of the software. So please no more "oh my dual core is 3.2GhZ so I have 6.4GhZ processing power "

 

Each core can run at the full clock rate. So for example, both cores of my 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo can run at full clock. Of course this doesn't mean my processor is equivalent to a single 5.06GHz Core 2 Solo. The inherent advantage of dual cores is that more processing power can be extracted at less cost (than increasing clock rate) by running processes in parallel (for example the main process will break up its components to run on different threads). A problem with this approach is that operating systems and programs must be designed to utilize multiple cores at the same time (it isn't simple, synchronization and resource sharing issues require some careful planning).

 

Are you trolling?

Because the 740QM runs with all 4 cores at 1.73ghz. not 432mhz.
When running only 1 core, it can run @ 2.93 GHz.

 

Yeah I think you need to learn a little bit more about processors before you start telling people how they work.

 

he actually made this thread becuase of my post in the gaming section here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-better-i5-i6-i7-multiple-core-advantage.html

now im more confused then ever. I never paid attention to all this new CPU tech until recently in the past few months and just last month i started looking for a new PC and found core i7, so can someone CORRECTLY tell me how does core i7 work? my guesswork was it runs at 1.73Ghz per core, but when turbo boosted that one core goes up to 2.93Ghz.

 

GhZ really isn't a good measure of processing power anymore anyway, as more processors can allocate more info per cycle. Also with operating system and the applications must be running linearly.

Also explain the following

Both processors run at stock 3.33GhZ

Core i7 980X Hexa-core ( 6 cores )
Core i7 975 Quad-core ( 4 cores )

both in the same enthusiast user category both similarly priced, by your logic by using a benchmarking software which are built for multi-core benchmarking the i7 980X should have an advantage as it should have 3.33GhZ potentially running effective on all 6 cores where as the i7 975 should only have it effective on 4, then we could say that just potentially the i7 975 could have 13.32GhZ processing power and the i7 980X could potentially have 19.98 Ghz Processing power explain why there is barely any noticeable difference between the 2 processors in multi-threaded applications?

 

You are correct.

 

This is impossible. If that was true, if I ran a single threaded game on a i7 740QM it would be running on 432.5MHz, impossible.

One of the benefits of a dual or quad core is that it can run multiple programs(or multi threaded software), at the rated clock speed.

 

Thanks guys for clearing it up for me +1 rep and sorry for the cross thread discussion.

 

See the wprime results here:
Intel Core i7 980X - 32nm Hexacore is here - Benchmarks: SuperPI & wPrime - www.nordichardware.com

As you can see, almost a 50% increase in perf.


Other multi-threaded applications might not be optimized for 6 cores.

/thread

 

Either the software can't benefit or isn't capable of it, or there is something besides the processor bottlenecking performance. The more cores you have, the harder it is to benefit from the increase in processing power. Also an i7 975 is very powerful, even if the 980X is more powerful. There are also plenty of benchmarks that do show the improved power of the 980X, but these are generally encoding, rendering, and the like.

 

You can learn a lot about the relative performance by studying the notebookcheck CPU benchmark list. The Cinebench 10 single test and SuperPi are both single-threaded applications which means that they will only use one core whereas Cinebench 10 multi or wPrime will create threads to use all available cores (note that for Cinebench higher is better whereas for SuperPi and wPrime lower is better). Unless you know that the programs you will use are multi-threaded then you may not see much benefit from a quad core CPU. Also, if you are fully loading all cores of a CPU then the speed will slow down in order to keep within the CPU power rating.

John

 

Please refrain from insulting other members or being disrespectful to them.

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