There are three ways that I know of to increase the speed of today's logic.
The first is better design. Improving the design adheres to the law of
diminishing returns that at some point becomes economically pointless. The
second is improving the technology, usually by decreasing the size of the
transistors and traces. This is a win/win situation, but requires
technological breakthroughs. The third is by increasing the voltage, which
leads to significantly increased heat and wear-and-tear on the circuits, and
is not a desirable solution. (This is how overclocking works.)
When more transistors are crammed onto one chip, it is clear that heat
increases proportionately, so, I think, your son's assertion cannot be
correct. Rather than increasing the voltage for superior performance (as in
overclocking and the ills associated with it), the designers are increasing
the computing power with parallel processing - which has its own problems
that are more tractable because they are software design-based rather than
hardware based. (Of course there ARE hardware problems, too; I am
referring to coherency type of problems.)
For players of state-of-the-art single-threaded games or users of
compute-intensive single-threaded software, a single core cpu **may** be
better than a dual core one, but most agree that a dual core cpu is better
for everyone else. Sometime in the future (we see some evidence of it now),
many more games will be multi-threaded and will also benefit from multi-core
cpu's.
My two cent's worth. :)
Dean Kukral
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Horley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2007 5:35 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] PCBUILD Digest - 5 Jul 2007 to 6 Jul 2007 (#2007-164)
Hi All:
I don't know a lot about processors, heat build up, Pentium D or dual
processors etc. but I was discussing this with my son, (instrumentation
tech. at Suncor) and he says the only reason for using the new dual core
technology is the manufacturers inability to design something to disperse
the heat build up in Pentium D and / or faster processors. So, whatever
works, go for it.
Joe at [log in to unmask]
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