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 postage stamps, which raises the question.
If they wanted edge over their competitor, why don't Intel or AMD just, you know,
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 forebanger
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 those 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 Wi-Fi 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 optimized 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 or 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? So thanks for watching guys.
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