Intel explains the megahertz war armistice

[HEXUS]

x86 clock speed race ended due to the superscalar 'conveyor level' says Intel.

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Maybe some games devs need informing too,as too many engines seem to just push one or two cores still.

[LeetyMcLeet]

Maybe some games devs need informing too,as too many engines seem to just push one or two cores still.

We have consoles to thank for this, I'm afraid.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

We have consoles to thank for this, I'm afraid.

I would say the opposite - the engines which scaled well with more cores seem to be in use in consoles,ie,like the Frostbite engine. Most of the games which don't scale well them tend, to be more PC focused and the devs have just re-used ancient engines or modified them,some of which are based on stuff from the 1990s. Bethesda Game Studios is a prime example of this,and so are many PC orientated MMOs,etc like WoW and PS2. Even when they attempt to multi-thread the engines,you still see very poor core loading despite that.

[kalniel]

We have consoles to thank for this, I'm afraid.

Nah it's the opposite of this - consoles all use AMD processors which tend to be less great at single threaded.

[DanceswithUnix]

Sorry, but that is a very confused article. It confuses superscaler (more than one instruction at once) with pipelined (break instruction execution up into sections). So x86 is a pipelined implementation (bad use of the word architecture) and some bits of the pipeline are hard to make faster so you add stages and make the pipeline much longer which adds transistors and makes branch prediction failure more expensive.

We can hit 5GHz with modern processors with a good overclock, double sounds possible, but the point is that the system at 10GHz would be slower than what we have. It isn't that we *can't* hit 10GHz, it is just that it doesn't help.

Edit: The whole thing sounds like an advert for the Amulet asynchronous ARM chip from a decade ago. Wonder what ever happened to that group.

[Blaineoliver]

Maybe some games devs need informing too,as too many engines seem to just push one or two cores still.

We have consoles to thank for this, I'm afraid.

I disagree, Consoles have lots of weak performing cores, they multi-thread quite intensely.

[Hoonigan]

We can hit 5GHz with modern processors with a good overclock

Aye, incredibly easy if you go with Intel. Ryzen users are getting a sweat on trying to reach 4GHz

[DanceswithUnix]

Aye, incredibly easy if you go with Intel. Ryzen users are getting a sweat on trying to reach 4GHz

lol, or my old FX8350.

It does amuse me though that the Pentium 4 failing to hit 4GHz was taken as the end of the GHz race, yet here we are with i7 chips going way way faster than that.

[Hoonigan]

lol, or my old FX8350.

It does amuse me though that the Pentium 4 failing to hit 4GHz was taken as the then of the GHz race, yet here we are with i7 chips going way way faster than that.

Yeah, my 7700K hits 5.2GHz now that I've delidded it, while keeping temps under 70°C. I've not tried pushing it any further yet.
I've also seen the 8700K hitting 5.5GHz on air, with a tiny bump in voltage.

[krazy_olie]

Well Pentium 4 was really peak Mghz they made the pipeline very deep, making each instruction very small, which allowed them to really crank up the clock speeds. Meanwhile AMDs architecture had better performance at a lower clock... even Pentium 3 at equivalent clock speed outperformed it, sometimes.
It actually scaled pretty well, starting at under 1ghz and reaching over 3ghz.

Meanwhile intel's mobile cpus which were more inline P2/3 architecture lead the way for core2 and then the clock speed race ended

[Troopa]

I kind of remember being really excited about Quad core et al a long time ago. Octagon cpu's and even bigger.
Real reason why cpu speed hasn't increased is because AMD dropped off the ether and there is no competition.