Question I'm having trouble understanding Single Core Turbo use cases ?

[Mo10Ko]

Hi, I recently started playing around with undervolting my CPU, and after looking at the specs of my 12600K, I realized that although the single-core turbo is 4.9 GHz, the all-core turbo is only 4.5 GHz. While I don't understand exactly how this works, I can see this being the case. My question is how is this ever used, other than benchmarks like single-core overclocks for Cinebench scores?

In addition, even for games like CS that are historically more single-core, high frequency dependent, I still am not seeing my CPU turbo to 4.9, even after limiting it to using only 1 and 2 threads in launch options. At the end of the day, I am just trying to see if I can squeeze any performance out of my PC, and to me, this single-core turbo just seems like a marketing trick.

I would appreciate any info on how the newer Intel architecture works.

 

[boju]

Yeah it's a tricky one, because Intel doesn't easily provide info on varying core boost.

Sites like Wikichip do

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-7700k

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8700k

Back then and still to these days, single core speeds (unless overclocking) is pretty much only seen in Windows, as in not doing much. Could say it's a gimmick since anything you do other than watching wallpapers LoL is going to use more than one core. You could try force a single core using affinity in task manager by unselecting threads for the game's application but that might not work out too well even if a certain game is single core oriented.

Frequency isn't everything though, as you're probably aware. Instructions per clock (IPC), the cycles to get stuff done is a lot higher with your cpu compared to say a 3~4 generations back even if frequency was higher, could even be doubled and yours would still trump.

 

[TerryLaze]

My question is how is this ever used, other than benchmarks like single-core overclocks for Cinebench scores?

Overclock is not the same as turbo.

Running CB with affinity on a single core and with only one thread will not make your CPU run at top single clock all the time either, it will only go up to it from time to time.
Have HWinfo running in the background while playing CS and it will keep track of the highest core clocks so you can see if your CPU ever reached it. (And it should)

Single core clocks are mostly useful for normal everyday office workloads where simple things can run a little faster so you will wait a little bit less until the system is responsive again or you can do something else.

 

[Mo10Ko]

Yeah it's a tricky one, because Intel doesn't easily provide info on varying core boost.

Sites like Wikichip do

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-7700k

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8700k

Back then and still to these days, single core speeds (unless overclocking) is pretty much only seen in Windows, as in not doing much. Could say it's a gimmick since anything you do other than watching wallpapers LoL is going to use more than one core. You could try force a single core using affinity in task manager by unselecting threads for the game's application but that might not work out too well even if a certain game is single core oriented.

Frequency isn't everything though, as you're probably aware. Instructions per clock (IPC), the cycles to get stuff done is a lot higher with your cpu compared to say a 3~4 generations back even if frequency was higher, could even be doubled and yours would still trump.

Yeah it seems to be the case that I'm just always sitting at all core turbo under load in hwinfo and I can't go above that, which is fine. And both Intel and AMD always cite IPC increases for their newer generations.

 

[Mo10Ko]

Overclock is not the same as turbo.

Running CB with affinity on a single core and with only one thread will not make your CPU run at top single clock all the time either, it will only go up to it from time to time.
Have HWinfo running in the background while playing CS and it will keep track of the highest core clocks so you can see if your CPU ever reached it. (And it should)

Single core clocks are mostly useful for normal everyday office workloads where simple things can run a little faster so you will wait a little bit less until the system is responsive again or you can do something else.

I'll try out the CS thing, because I remember hearing that CSGO only used 2 to 4 cores, but CS2 seems to use much more (manually setting the threads in launch options, using all 16 gives me about 80 more fps than using just the p cores a with 6 threads). Now that could be due to CS2 choosing wrong threads to use, and I'm sure CS isn't realistically gonna use all of the threads, but when I see in afterburner that CPU usage is at like 40%, I'm assuming it's referring to high utilization of a few cores, in which case certain cores should be boosting. However, they seem to just sit at base clock 3.6 for the whole time across all cores if I leave the ratios on auto.