> > Am just thinking out loud and am very hungry & maybe not making sense... but...
> >
> > Faster could have a bearing on cost though - if you made cores that ran 4x faster for the same power, could
> > you have 4x fewer? I know most of the area is not cpu cores, but there are a lot of gpu 'cores' on modern
> > chips and if you could make them substantially faster per unit, then you could reduce area & cost?
> >
> > I know that graphics is easily parallel and a design with many slower, lower powered gpu 'cores'
> > has better power characteristics than one with fewer faster, more power hungry ones,
>
>
> In general, a 2X CPU is always better than two 1X CPUs. Usually substantially better (a few pathological
> cases give the edge to the dual core configuration). The problem is that increasing single threaded performance
> has become very difficult, in large part because of the power requirements associated with higher clock
> speeds. So the hardware guys are building multi-core CPUs, rather than the faster single core CPUs that
> everyone actually wants, because that's all they *can* do. For EP problems, like graphics acceleration,
> it's mostly about maximizing the power efficiency (computations per Joule), which enables the largest number
> of compute units on the device (although some minimum performance requirements exist).

Sure, I was saying it because I thought GaAs allowed faster switching speeds for transistors at similar power