Nvidia Says More CPU Cores are Better (and Why)

[pinkfloydminnesota]

so, i guess they mean it takes less than half as much power to run a chip at 50% than it does at 100%? maybe? i know, i'm an idiot.

 

[rhino13]

The logic to load balance and prevent race conditions seems to be inactive here.
That stuff burns up a ton of power. So for me, I'd say single core is better.

 

[bejabbers]

[citation][nom]theholylancer[/nom]sooooo they are saying AMD > intel given that they offers more cores at the price point?IE for the price of i5, you can get a Ph II X6?or more just mobile (and our stuff only) and marketing had gotten a brain fart?[/citation]
The intel chips, most of them anyways, have hyperthreading. This means, in the case of the i5, you have 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores. So at that price point AMD offers you 6 cores while intel offers you 8.

 

[orangegator]

Am I missing something? How can the processing workload of 100% of a single core at 1Ghz be the same as a dual core at 50% AND only 550mhz? Wouldn't the dual core need to run at about 90% load at 550mhz give or take in order to perform the same workload?

 

[efok]

The comparison between 6 core amd and quad core intel isn't the same, as intel has the advantage in IPC and clockspeed / better turbo boost. Plus current software usually don't fully utilize 4 cores let alone 6. As for power consumption, Intel has more aggressive power savings that AMD on idle resources, hence a clearly more efficient chip both power and performance wise. The ARM Cortex A9 you are using the same chip, same power management and perhaps there are times when you only want to finish the job in just the right time so the dual core operates at a more efficient clockspeed, rather than trying to finish the job as fast as possible. So 2 cores can do the same work in the same time as 1 faster core and use less power. Or 2 cores can finish the work faster and return to a lower power state and use a similar total power over the whole job.

 

[southernshark]

They need to use logic when they create an argument. Something like this.

More cores is good.

And how do we know that more cores is good?

Does a bug have a lot of eye lenses?

-Yes a bug has many eye lenses.

And are there a lot of bugs?

-Yes bugs are everywhere.

As such more cores are good as proven by the fact that there are lots of bugs which have lots of eye lenses. Bugs also have more legs than humans and there are more bugs than humans.

 

[mdrejhon]

[citation][nom]allenpan[/nom]i dont think the "power" cumsumption umber is wrong, assuming Power = Voltage * Current (P=VI or P=VIcos@) or Voltage ^2 * Resistance (P=V^2R) or Power = Current ^2 / Resistance (P=I^2/R)[/citation]I did Electronics in school, and know Ohm's Law....
...However, the power consumption in a CPU is more logarithmic and does not follow Ohm's Law. Due to various effects, even a 0.1 volt increase can, say, quadruple or septuple power consumption in certain types of digital circuits.

Think silicon breakdown voltage. Say, 0.3 volts for a certain type of diode. Just like when you try to push 0.2 VOLTS into the diode, you get 0 AMPS. But you try to push 0.5 VOLTS into the diode with no current-limiting resistors, you get a SHORT CIRCUIT.

 

[enzo matrix]

ok great. So Nvidia proved that under moderate load, dual cores will consume less power because under the specific load, the single core will be maxed and the dual core wont sweat.

BUT this still leaves two issues. when maxed the dual will consume more power and more importantly, on idle, the dual will consume more power...

 

[Guest]

Nvidia needs to double check their math and their logic.
First off, if a single core is maxed out at 100% doing a particular task. That does NOT mean that two cores doing the same task will each be running at 50%. Potentially both cores could still be running at 100% if the task is hefty enough. Or they could each be at 75% and 75% or it could even be 100% and 0% if the app is not multi-thread friendly. There's an almost unlimited number of possibily permutations. In the worst case scenario, the dual core would provide no performance beneift whatsoever, while still using up more power.

Even if dual cores are perfectly optimized for improved performance and efficiency while in use. They will still always use more power while idle. If we're talking about smartphones, how much time do they spend idle compared to being in use during the day? It's typically a pretty big percentage for most people.

fact: Multicore processing is not faster than single core. If you have a dual core at 2GHz and a single core at 2GHz, obviously the dual core will be faster. But firstly, it will NOT be exactly twice, and secondly it's not an apples-to-apples comparison anyway.
BUT: If you have 2 cores running at 2GHz and compare that to one core that's exactly the same, except it runs at 4GHz. The single core will be faster everytime. Because it will be able to do everything twice as fast as either of the dual cores, but without any of the overhead and fighting for resources.


Multicore processing was introduced because these days the speed of individual cores is much more difficult to increase compared to how easy it is to just add more cores.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]theholylancer[/nom]sooooo they are saying AMD > intel given that they offers more cores at the price point?IE for the price of i5, you can get a Ph II X6?or more just mobile (and our stuff only) and marketing had gotten a brain fart?[/citation]

I don't think thats exactally what they are getting at. They are speaking mainly on smartphone technology. In most cases, smartphones are designed to utilize the full potential they have in them with the OS design.

Basically when we have dual core smartphones, the software will be more in line with the hardware where as with PCs, the hardware is always more advanced than the software.

This is mainly because PC technology, it moves extremley fast in comparison to smartphone technology. In about 2 years we went from 500Mhz CPUs to 1GHz CPUs. In about a year we will have dual core CPUs in smartphones. In the same time period, we went from dual cores being the top end (Core 2 Duo) and quads being the sort of super high end to quads being the top end and noe we have six core CPUs being the super top end thats not really needed due to software thats behind.

By the time they have a dual core inside a smartphone, we will be on the verge of 8 core CPUs. Add in that desktop CPus will also have GPUs on the die in January (Sandy Bridge) and then in Q2/3 of 2011 with AMD.

In short, smartphone technology moves at a pace that software can keep up with it much like software used to keep up with PC hardware.

 

[oneblackened]

[citation][nom]alyoshka[/nom]So Nvidia finally see's light????If that's the case they really need to beat the world fastest dual processor card by making a sing dual core GPU.......[/citation]
Well, real honestly, GPU's are massively multicore CPUs. When I say massively multicore... look at the GF110. It's a 512-Shader core part. That's, as far as I'm aware, about the power of 250 dual core processors.

 

[bluekoala]

I think that what a lot of people fail to realize that the time frame remains the same. If the duel core worked at 100%, the load time would be cut in half, therefore going back to idle much sooner and saving power. Duel core vs Single core idle power is not an exact science either. I think a duel core can have the same idle power draw as a single core.

I have a Motorolla Milestone and ended up setting the voltage .02v less than stock and setting the clock speed to 800mhz with great stability, I might even lower the voltage some more to see if it's still stable. The result is better battery life and a more responsive phone. Somehow I get better battery life than I did with stock.

 

[Aoster87]

This just in: Fire still hot.

 

[dco]

If more cores equals less power consumption in mobile cpu's why is it that in desktop's it ALWAYS equals more power consumption, just look at any benchmark from toms hardware.

 

[sykozis]

[citation][nom]alyoshka[/nom]So Nvidia finally see's light????If that's the case they really need to beat the world fastest dual processor card by making a sing dual core GPU.......[/citation]

Ummm....I think you're confused. GF104, is a 336 "core" GPU....GF100, is either a 480 "core" or 448 "core" GPU.... GF110 is a 512 "core" GPU. So, unless you're meaning that nVidia should do what Intel did with the original Core 2 products (Q6600 was nothing but a pair of E6600s sharing a single physical package) or the Pentium-D line... (2 Prescott P4's sharing a single physical package). If nVidia were to try this....they'd have to create a new interconnect to allow the 2 die's to communicate within the processor package. Just imagine....GF208 = 2x GF104 sharing a single physical package....

 

[maurath55]

The first ten or so posters are morons. They are talking about phone cpus like the arm. Leave it up to you tards to start an amd vs intel flame war.

 

[WarraWarra]

So what is new NVidia we know this, that is why we want the A15 quad core 2.5ghz cpu in our mobile phones by Jun 2011.

A15 specs Nvidia read this:
http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=cpu&id=acxa15mp&c=arm_cortex-a15_mpcore

DUH.

Dual core will be old hat by Dec 2011 then what will Nvidia / Apple do ? still lag behind as usual ??

My 2 year old Samsung "Jet / S8000 / I8000 / Omnia" has 2 processors in it already DUH
800mhz cpu for portable pc part + 300mhz cpu for phone / comms functions.

Also it has 4x memory units ie:
RAM capacity: 256 MiB
ROM capacity: 512 MiB (accessible: 150 MiB)
Secondary:ROM-capacity: 1.9 GiB
Removable Micro sd card 16gb+ .

Hello get with the 2008's here Nvidia stop being so primitive.

 

[WarraWarra]

[citation][nom]JerseyFirefighter[/nom]On a side note, at least my smartphone will be able to play crysis in the near future.[/citation]

I think there is one that does already or a mobile version or it has not been released yet that is why the opposite team is pushing the unreal game engine on mobile phones so hard.

Crysis on a Intel Atom + Ion 2 IGP has been done as well as amazing as that is.

 

[rpgplayer]

[citation][nom]techguy911[/nom]Its all based on software if software or os does not use extra cores having more cores does not help, some games still only use 1 core even windows 7 uses 2 cores any more don't help.Having more than 1 core in xp does not help as it was not designed to do so windows 8 will make more use of more cores but most game developers still are behind on making multi-threaded games work well with 3 or more cores.The problem lies with hardware if hardware could do the multi-threading on its own instead of relying on coding it for muli-thread use it would make it much easier to create software that could utilize more cores.[/citation]


hate to say but windows xp does in fact use more than one core, windows xp is based off of windows 2000, which in turn is based off of windows NT, all of which support multiple processors.

now as to whether they handle them efficiently is another matter. none of them are as efficient at handling threads as windows 7 is, but they still handle threads better on multiple cores better than a single core alone.

a simple test for this is to open up 2 different programs and open task manager, you'll see both cores are active. the main downside to the days of windows xp, 2000 or NT is that during that time the market penetration of multithreaded programs was around 5%. meaning that in most cases running a single program was just as fast with one core as it was for 2 or 4 cores.
even today less than half of the programs released are multithreaded, but multiple core count cpus are the norm so it's not as if you are paying a huge premium for a 2 core processor over a single core.

 

[JsPcKiP]

[citation][nom]alyoshka[/nom]So Nvidia finally see's light????If that's the case they really need to beat the world fastest dual processor card by making a sing dual core GPU.......[/citation]

Yes, too bad Nvidia's GTX 580 has 512 cores...

 

[onyx_64]

[citation][nom]allenpan[/nom]i dont think the "power" cumsumption umber is wrong, assuming Power = Voltage * Current (P=VI or P=VIcos@) or Voltage ^2 * Resistance (P=V^2R) or Power = Current ^2 / Resistance (P=I^2/R)[/citation]

P = C(V^2)f

end of story.

 

[mustbhacks]

[citation][nom]JerseyFirefighter[/nom]AMD's benchmarks fall short overall vs it's same priced intel... i.e. the AMD x6 1090T vs the core i7 950. You can find the two for relatively the same price and cpu benchmarks put the intel over the AMD. Not to say that AMD still has the best bang for the buck on most of their products, but for AMD's top of the line hexacore, you'd expect it to beat our it's competitors quad cores. (there are also a number of quads above the 950 as im sure you know)[/citation]

1090T = $230 Decent Mobo = $110
i7 950 = $290 Decent Mobo = $195

What do you call relatively the same price? You're paying ~35% more for that intel setup.

 

[deltatux]

No shit NVIDIA?

 

[blackjellognomes]

[citation][nom]Horhe[/nom]I'm loyal to price/performance ratio, but biased towards Nvidia when it comes to video cards, because I like Nvidia CPL more than ATI CCC (which lacks scaling with fixed aspect ratio).So, seeing as the performance of the smartphones' CPU rose dramatically in the past years, and the performance of the desktop CPU rose only a little, does this mean that in a few years phones will be as powerful as desktop PCs? We need faster desktop CPUs, not a CPU with 2^n (n>=4) cores. What am I going to do with so many idle cores?[/citation]Heard of multithreaded applications?
CPU clocks are thermally limited. We can only produce faster CPUs when we have the technology to minimize the heat output, so it's a lot more realistic to implement more multithreaded applications than it is to keep pushing out faster and faster CPUs.

 

[dEAne]

As long as the software that runs with it utilizes all cores then it is always a good thing to choose multi core cpu.