abraidwood (alistair_braidwood.delete@this.yahoo.co.uk) on April 29, 2015 11:48 pm wrote:
> > > 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


Unfortunately the wires are already the slow part, and they're getting slower. Faster transistors will only help a bit.