Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chronial 1294 days ago
> Single core clock speed hasn't changed in over 10 years now?

This is not true. I thought the same thing and you are right in regards to base line clock speed. But the performance is still increasing. I just got a new PC at work with a 2021 high-end CPU and it has 200% single core performance of the 2015 mid-range CPU in my private PC:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4597vs2599/Intel-i9-129...

2 comments

Well, CPU got a lot better at benchmarks, that is true. Caches got bigger, predictions got better. Specialized instructions were added. IPC improvement kinda slowed down after Sandy Bridge, at least for Intel.

Also, the comment you're quoting is talking about clock speed, and the link you provided literally shows the same base clock speed - 3.2 GHz. Intel progressively pushed turbo speed higher, but that the speed you could have achieved yourself by overclocking.

Does the CPU constantly hold the turbo speed under a single threaded workload?
Depends. The cpu attempts to hold the maximum possible speed on any cores that are in use.

On my water cooled and specifically tweaked desktop- yes. It’ll hold max boost indefinitely, even with all threads. (getting to about 80c after 10 mins). Single-thread max is faster, and it’ll hold that as well.

My laptop will pull power within 15 seconds and be down to base clocks in a couple mins. Unless I set it down outside and it’s very cold.

Most un-tweaked chips are going to be below 25 watts with a single core loaded, and lots of laptops can cool that without any problems.
It depends on motherboard and cooling. 6700K, for example, is constantly running at 4.2Ghz or 4.5Ghz (winter clocks). Constantly while thermals allow it... Non-overclocking motherboards allow it to boost for 2 minutes, after that, it's iffy.
Are you simply glossing over the fact that CPU 1 has a turbo of 5.2 Ghz and the other 3.6 Ghz ?
Yes, I did not go into details where the differences are coming from. The base clockspeeds are the same, which is obviously the number that GP noticed not changing over the last 10 years.

Other things changed. The turbo clockspeed is one of them.

Also, the the old one is 65W TDP and the new one is 241W TDP.