have you ever noticed that when you want to find out what speed your CPU or
graphics card runs that there's a bunch of seemingly conflicting information
well the way processors work has changed in amazing ways over the last couple of
decades but one of the most remarkable things about modern microprocessors
whether we're talking about the ones that go in your phone your PC or even in
a massive server is their ability to dynamically deliver only the performance
that's needed at a given moment I'll explain why they do this but first a bit
of history it didn't always work this way when I was growing up a 486 TX 33
megahertz processor ran it 33 megahertz gosh darn it and if 33 megahertz was
good enough for when it was working hard then it was good enough rone it was sitting around doing nothing - and that
was fine well a couple of things were still true first is that processors ran
so cool that they just needed tiny small thin heat sinks on the MOR at worst a
very small fan and second is that the laptop mobile PC revolution hadn't
started yet and a little extra power consumption is a relatively small deal
if you're not trying to power something off of a battery well that changed fast
Intel and AMD were locked in an arms race to see who could create that
fastest desktop CPUs voltages and power were pumped up and existing design
architectures were pushed to their limits all without worrying too much
about efficiency in pursuit of the almighty gigahertz barrier and beyond to
hell with cool and quiet I mean to put this in perspective from 1996 to 2000
alone stop cooling went from looking like this to looking like this but that
all came at a cost your power bill aside more power consumption produces waste
heat and when a processor runs hot all the time its lifespan is reduced
something had to be done but what if you
could run at benchmark crushing high performance frequencies when needed and
turned down the juice the rest of the time well that's exactly what happened
Intel speedstep was born all right light it so that's a lot of preamble but why
does my CPU or graphics card have these ambiguous specifications well because
while all this was happening a mobile revolution was occurring and when you're
going to be running off of a battery power consumption sits in the fur seat
and raw performance sits in the back so the philosophies of the processor makers
changed and we stopped getting massive leaps in single core performance but
computing demands also didn't stand still so they needed a different
solution back to this graph a lower clock processor core actually consumes
so much less power that you can put more
than one of them on a CPU instead of a single high-performance core for better
overall performance and optimized workloads multi-core processors were
born but some applications don't benefit
from these additional cores and we still need to crush single threaded
performance from time to time and that's what a CPU with Intel turbo booth does
unlike speed steps outright performance
reduction it actually redirects power from coarse that aren't needed and
sacrifices some efficiency in the remaining core or course to boost up the
clock speeds to a predetermined limit and that is what we see when we look at
CPU specifications a nominal frequency that all course can reach at the same
time and an amped-up boosted frequency
that a single core can reach as long as thermal and power limits allow it when
you need the extra juice this type of dynamic power on-demand design isn't
unique to Intel either NVIDIA GPU boost boosts the entire processor rather than
redirecting power from one part to another but similarly looks for
sufficiently low power consumption and temperatures and increases performance
on demand pretty cool stuff hey speaking of pretty cool my CPU when it's idle
yeah sorry no awkward segue today since our sales team didn't manage to sell an
add integration on this video so that's all that's left is for me to thank you
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