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Dumb question, but whats the engineering principle behind higher performance when increasing power usage? Is it because pipelines are clocked faster?
by sydthrowaway 5y ago
Dumb question, but whats the engineering principle behind higher performance when increasing power usage?
Is it because pipelines are clocked faster?
- jeffbee 5y agoHigher clocks of the same part always draw more power, more than proportionally to the increase in clock speed because the voltage in the core also needs to increase to reach the higher clock.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI would guess it is some combination of: - longer pipelines - more silicon dedicated to speculative execution for more Instruction Level Parallelism - bigger caches - More analysis of incoming instruction stream to get more ILP and out of order execution But yeah, more clock is more power is more heat.
- jagger27 5y agoI'm not sure if I'm reading your question correctly, but the general idea behind running really hot and fast is to get tasks done more quickly and return to a lower power state. The "big" cores of chips like the M1 are meant to run "bursty" workloads, where as the the "little" cores are better lightweight longer running tasks (and also take up much less die space, which is another major factor).
- wmf 5y agoFor transistors, power = frequency x voltage^2 x capacitance and since voltage is proportional to frequency it means power ~= frequency^3. That's why Alder Lake is quite efficient at low clocks but crazy power hungry when you let it turbo.
- renewiltord 5y agoNot sure at what level you want the answer and others are answering at other layers so I'll cover this one. Ultimately, the faster clock means you're discharging and charging things at the gate level more often. Changing this state expends energy. More changing, more energy used per unit time, more power necessary.