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dead weight that's not utilized Dead weight, maybe, but unpowered dead weight. That’s the real tradeoff here. If you devote all of your silicon to one big gene
by chongli 6y ago
dead weight that's not utilized
Dead weight, maybe, but unpowered dead weight. That’s the real tradeoff here. If you devote all of your silicon to one big general purpose machine, you need to use it for everything and so it’s always powered.
If your general purpose machine can do every task but nothing well then it’s essentially always wasting a lot of energy. A collection of special purpose cores, on the other hand, might power on and off at different times, depending on the need. Each one could perform its task with a great deal of speed and energy efficiency. The whole system would then be much more energy efficient because it would only use the resources it needs to perform its tasks.
It’s like choosing to own either: a) a Ferrari super car or b) a minivan and a super sport bike. In the former case, you can go really fast if you want, but you’re going to be wasting a lot of fuel getting groceries or picking the kids up at school. In the latter case, you have one vehicle for mundane tasks and another for high speed fun. Your fuel costs will be way lower and you’ll be much more energy efficient!
- shmerl 6y agoMay be more energy efficient but likely less powerful overall in general case.
- chongli 6y agoIf you want a computer with maximum general purpose power, you can buy a Threadripper today. For the rest of us who use laptops, we want energy efficiency without throttling the machine to death. Special purpose cores are a great alternative to heavy throttling of a general purpose machine.
- shmerl 6y agoThat depends. I'm fine with using Ryzen 9 with 12 cores without the need to go to a Threadripper. I doubt it would work in a laptop well. It does need a good cooler.
- FpUser 6y ago>"For the rest of us who use laptops, we want energy efficiency without throttling the machine to death" I am not sure about worldwide ratio of "us" vs them. Personally I have desktop and laptop. Laptop is not as powerful as desktop but it is still a little monster soon to be replaced with the big monster of laptop. Laptop is being used for going to client, general development when staying out of the main office for extended time in summer etc. I am not using it in a settings where the external power is not available so I do not really care about the efficiency. Rather I care about performance, especially during builds.
- fulafel 6y agoRelatively rarely utilized, but power efficient, ASIC blocks are a natural consequence from the problem of big transistor budgets and diminishing returns of using it on CPU cores, and chips being limited by thermal & power consumption.