The Q6660 Inside :
By overclocking I was referring to the TDP limits and turbo modes. With a Jaguar/Athlon each core can be clocked up or down without any dependencies. Like you can have Core 0 at 4Ghz and Core 1 at 1Ghz. For many workloads you don't need every core running at the base clock. Ideally you could get 1 or 2 cores to clock even higher than usual, while preserving TDP with the remaining cores at much lower clock speeds.
The feature you describe is already in both AMD and Intel products. The first Stars chips (K10- Barcelona/Agena Phenoms) and the S1g2 Athlon Ultras introduced individual per-core clocking for AMD. This actually was a big reason why the Agena Phenoms did so poorly in benchmarks compared to the Core 2s which had all cores on a CPU running at the same speed. Windows didn't (and still largely doesn't) do core parking very well. The relatively slow clock speed ramp times in waking up a idling core on Agena/Barcelona after a thread bounced from core to core really sacked performance. That's one of the reasons why AMD did so much better with the Deneb Phenom IIs- they tweaked the Cool 'n Quiet driver for the 45 nm Stars chips to make all cores run at one speed on Windows, which "solved" that problem as far as benchmarks were concerned and made otherwise similar Phenom IIs benchmark much faster than original Phenoms.
IIRC per-core clocking came to Intel with Nehalem. Now both makers have heavy use of it as well as turbo states. They additionally essentially can power off unused cores in their CPUs with the C6 states. Intel had deeper C-states a bit longer than AMD (I believe many of them came with the Pentium M or original Core) but both had them by the time the first Bulldozer CPU rolled off the line. Bulldozer has a much higher idle speed than Stars- 1.4 GHz vs. 800 MHz- but Bulldozer draws a small fraction of idle power draw because Bulldozer has C6 states while the best Stars could do was the desktop Core Duo-esque C1E.
If you look at Intel mobile processors some of them can turbo 1Ghz over their base clock. I'd like to see that grow even larger to like 2Ghz. A lot of what we do on computers tends to be bursty in nature. Temporary super-Turbos would make PCs feel even more responsive.
Intel already does this. They allow some of their laptop CPUs to have a temporary top Turbo speed which draws well in excess of the TDP, but only if the heatsink isn't too warm and only for a very short period of time (31 sec the last time I looked.) After that it drops down to a "more sustainable" Turbo speed if not lower, based on power consumption and temperature. AMD is a little more conservative and won't let its CPUs' Turbo power draws exceed the TDP of the chip. They will however let the CPU run at its full TDP all day long as long as cooling is adequate, which allows those of us who undervolt the CPU a little to essentially get maximum all-cores turbo speeds indefinitely when the CPU is loaded.
griptwister :
The only thing would suggest to Intel is to try to make 6-8 Core no HT CPUs more common.
There wouldn't be much of a market for that. All of the post-Nehalem chips have HyperThreading built into the die so it's not like there can be a cost savings in not turning HT on. There isn't any reason to turn it off except to try to demand a higher price for the non-crippled versions (e.g. i7-4770K vs i5-4570K). You also are wanting to run pretty well threaded stuff if you are even considering a 6 or 8 core CPU so why not have HT enabled?
I do agree that Intel should try to fire a shot over AMD's bow and try to finally release a mainstream (<$350) 6-core chip on the desktop based on Haswell. Intel led a hard charge from single core to dual core to quad core in 2005-2007 and then pretty well stopped. Meanwhile, AMD kept on going, introducing the first reasonably affordable 6-core and now the only 8-core desktop chip. AMD's 8-core chips costing 2/3 as much as Intel's 4-core i7s are as fast or faster in multithreaded stuff. Intel could easily put an end to that with an inexpensive (both to make and sell) sub-200 mm^2 6-core Haswell. I think Intel bought the "mobile is everything, the desktop is dead" hype hook, line, and sinker as they continue to just recycle laptop chips through the desktop space and cripple the enormous-die several generations old server chips for enthusiast desktop. Of course the market will stagnate if you don't introduce new products- welcome to Microsoft's dilemma.
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