Remember when CPU’s / GPU’s had clockspeeds that didn’t include “up to”
I understand why it’s better net performance doing it this way and better uses the whole potential performance of the chip.
That still doesn’t make me like it, not because of the technical reasons, but because of the way they twist the marketing, it could hit 6ghz for 1 microsecond and they could still claim #nowupto6ghz!
Clock speed isn’t improving that quickly anymore. Other aspects, such as more optimized power consumption, memory speeds, cache sized, less cycle-demanding operations, more cores have been improving faster instead.
That would’ve been a single 3ghz cpu core. Now we have dozens in one chip. Also, the instruction sets and microcode has gotten way better since then as well.
We’re running into hard physical limits now, the transistors in each chip are so small that any smaller and they’d start running into quantumn effects that would render them unreliable.
I remember when chips first hit 1GHz around 1999. Tech magazines were claiming that we’d hit 7GHz in 5 years.
What they failed to predict is that you start running into major heat issues if you try to go past ~3GHz. Which is why CPU manufacturers started focusing on other ways to improve performance, such as multiple cores and better memory management.
The ultimate fix remains unexplored: reversible computing uses 0-1 pairs. Basically you do logic on the left one and swap them to invert that logical bit. Because the charge is simply transmitted, instead of grounded away or powered up, negligible entropy is involved.
I suspect you’d have to sink the values eventually… but I expect you could send them off “behind the woodshed” for that. Do all the work in some tiny flake of silicon, then transmit a stream of noise to a big dumb block of metal.
My dad had one of the first consumer 3GHz chips available. By the time I inherited it in 2009 it was completely outclassed by a <2GHz dual-core laptop.
I guess the upside is that you don’t have to mess with overclocking haha. Just slap a liquid cooler in and you don’t have to change the clock because it still won’t hit 6ghz for more than 15 seconds.
When I say I can give people up to 10 inches they seem pretty disappointed when I don’t deliver, assuming it’ll be the same here with the silicone lottery with some CPUs going to struggle to maintain 6GHZ
Honestly if there were a hardware manufacturer that didn’t have the intel management engine style functionality or AMD’s equivalent of it, I would build my next laptop with that even if if the base clock and shared cache was rated for half that amount.
System76 make linux-based computers, and they specifically ship them with the IME disabled. I know that’s not exactly what you ask for, but it’s similar in nature
I actually considered a thelios or whatever they call their desktop systems are called but, the fact that their motherboards don’t support liquid cooling blocks was a turn off for me. Id get a laptop but they are so very expensive. If only I had the money, it would be my first choice however. Certainly now that Linux gaming has become just as good if not even a better experience than on wendoze.
The downside of disabling it is the chance of bricking your expensive silicon, as the drivers to it are mysteriously inaccessible to the operating system, but I literally can’t think of anything else to add once it’s already down. It’s not-end user facing, there’s no API for it, it’s basically just there to be a firmware back door for the NSA and possibly extremely skilled foreign hackers. It doesn’t affect the actual processing layer of the chip at all IIRC.
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