WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.640 Have you had a look at your motherboard lately? Even though the CPU is arguably 00:00:04.640 --> 00:00:09.840 your PC's most important component, it still has about as much space dedicated to it 00:00:09.840 --> 00:00:14.200 as it did in 1993. I mean, the entire CPU package 00:00:14.200 --> 00:00:18.240 is only about the size of a couple postage stamps, which raises the question. 00:00:18.240 --> 00:00:23.120 If they wanted edge over their competitor, why don't Intel or AMD just, you know, 00:00:23.120 --> 00:00:27.160 make their CPUs bigger? Imagine how many cores 00:00:27.160 --> 00:00:31.800 and how much performance we could have if we had a CPU the size of a grilled cheese? 00:00:31.800 --> 00:00:35.160 Or am I missing something here? To answer, we reached out to our friends, 00:00:35.160 --> 00:00:40.080 Matthew Hurwitz at AMD and Ben Benson at Intel, and we'd like to thank both of them for their insights. 00:00:40.080 --> 00:00:44.880 One easy way to conceptualize this is thinking about how a car engine works. 00:00:44.880 --> 00:00:48.880 Even in a smaller car, you could theoretically throw in a high-performance 00:00:48.880 --> 00:00:52.040 10-cylinder engine instead of the responsible forebanger 00:00:52.040 --> 00:00:57.240 that carries you to your cubicle job. But obviously, a 10-cylinder engine costs a lot more 00:00:57.320 --> 00:01:03.400 to manufacture than an inline four. And even those CPUs are far smaller than car engines, 00:01:03.400 --> 00:01:06.800 adding more transistors isn't exactly cheap. 00:01:06.800 --> 00:01:13.320 Not to mention that if you make the chips bigger, the manufacturers get fewer CPUs per silicon wafer, 00:01:13.320 --> 00:01:19.040 driving up the cost of each one. Additionally, a larger die means that there's a higher chance 00:01:19.040 --> 00:01:24.520 of a given CPU being defective. CPU fabrication is a very complex process, 00:01:24.640 --> 00:01:29.160 and not every one of those slices we just showed you is going to be usable. 00:01:29.160 --> 00:01:32.480 In fact, a significant proportion of CPUs 00:01:32.480 --> 00:01:37.560 are discarded at the factory because of very small defects that can hurt performance 00:01:37.560 --> 00:01:43.560 or even make the chip unusable. So manufacturers don't want to add even more complexity 00:01:43.560 --> 00:01:47.560 that will push their yields of sellable chips down, hurting their margins. 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:52.760 But even if yields were close to 100%, it still doesn't make a ton of sense for manufacturers 00:01:52.800 --> 00:01:56.720 to make a larger die. You see, it's actually very difficult 00:01:56.720 --> 00:02:00.080 to produce a large CPU with tons of cores 00:02:00.080 --> 00:02:04.840 that run at the same clock speed as a CPU that has fewer cores and is smaller. 00:02:04.840 --> 00:02:09.440 Not only do you need to contend with more heat, it can also harm performance 00:02:09.440 --> 00:02:15.160 because at the clock speeds of modern CPUs, even a few extra centimeters can make it difficult 00:02:15.160 --> 00:02:19.200 to keep everything in sync, forcing you to run at lower clocks. 00:02:19.200 --> 00:02:23.640 This is especially true if you're trying to support that extra processing power 00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:28.160 with additional cache memory. This is part of the reason that if you've ever looked up the specs 00:02:28.160 --> 00:02:32.520 for high core count CPUs, you'll have noticed that the clock frequencies 00:02:32.520 --> 00:02:36.000 are generally lower than they are for more mainstream chips. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:39.960 Similarly to how Wi-Fi is a trade-off between speed and range, 00:02:39.960 --> 00:02:43.840 CPU design is a trade-off between speed and die size 00:02:43.840 --> 00:02:48.680 or more specifically core count. So instead of trying to make the largest CPUs 00:02:48.680 --> 00:02:52.240 with the most transistors, manufacturers instead think about 00:02:52.240 --> 00:02:56.840 how the processor is actually going to be used and optimized for that. 00:02:56.840 --> 00:03:00.520 Because a huge CPU die would have to run at a lower clock speed, 00:03:00.520 --> 00:03:06.040 it might not be as good for an application like gaming or trying to get fast performance in a single thread 00:03:06.040 --> 00:03:10.760 is generally the best way to go. Additionally, simply brute forcing performance 00:03:10.760 --> 00:03:15.160 by adding more transistors doesn't always yield the best results anyway. 00:03:15.160 --> 00:03:18.440 Instead, the architecture of a CPU can be adjusted 00:03:18.440 --> 00:03:22.920 with specific use cases in mind, such as quick sync video on Intel platforms 00:03:22.920 --> 00:03:27.360 to help with transcoding or AMD's inclusion of PCI Express Gen 4 00:03:27.360 --> 00:03:32.520 to enable super high speed storage. So remember that bigger isn't always better. 00:03:32.520 --> 00:03:35.960 And besides, if they made CPU packages super huge, 00:03:35.960 --> 00:03:39.360 where would you put all that sweet RGB? So thanks for watching guys. 00:03:39.360 --> 00:03:42.920 You can like or dislike, depending on how you feel. 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