Gadgetory

have you ever noticed that when you want to find out what speed your CPU or graphics card runs that there's a bunch of seemingly conflicting information well the way processors work has changed in amazing ways over the last couple of decades but one of the most remarkable things about modern micro processors whatever we're talking about the ones that go in your phone your PC or even in a massive server is their ability to dynamically deliver only the performance that's needed at a given moment I'll explain why they do this but first a bit of history it didn't always work this way when I was growing up a 486 TX 33 megahertz processor ran it 33 megahertz flash during it and if 33 megahertz was good enough for when it was working hard then it was good enough rone it was sitting around doing nothing - and that was fine well a couple of things were still true first is that processors ran so cool that they just needed tiny small thin heat sinks on the more at worst a very small fan and second is that the laptop mobile PC revolution hadn't started yet and a little extra power consumption is a relatively small deal if you're not trying to power something off of a battery well that changed fast Intel and AMD were locked in an arms race to see who could create that fastest desktop CPUs voltages and power were pumped up and existing design architectures were pushed to their limits all without worrying too much about efficiency in pursuit of the almighty gigahertz barrier and beyond to hell with cool and quiet I mean to put this in perspective from 1996 to 2000 alone stop cooling went from looking like this to looking like this but that all came at a cost your power bill aside more power consumption produces waste heat and when a processor runs hot all the time its lifespan is reduced something had to be done but what if you could run at benchmark crushing high performance frequencies when needed and turned down the juice the rest of the time well that's exactly what happened intel speedstep was born all right light it so that's a lot of preamble but why does my cpu or graphics card have these ambiguous specifications well because while all this was happening a mobile revolution was occurring and when you're going to be running off of battery power consumption sits in the front seat and raw performance sits in the back so the philosophies of the processor makers changed and we stopped getting massive leaps in single core performance but computing demands also didn't stand still so they needed a different solution back to this graph a lower clock processor core actually consumes so much less power that you can put more than one of them on a CPU instead of a single high-performance core for better overall performance and optimized workloads multi-core processors were born but some applications don't benefit from these additional cores and we still need to crush single-threaded performance from time to time and that's what a cpu with Intel turbo boost does unlike speed steps outright performance reduction it actually redirects power from course that aren't needed and sacrifices some efficiency in the remaining core or course to boost up the clock speeds to a predetermined limit and that is what we see when we look at CPU specifications a nominal frequency that all course can reach at the same time and an amped-up boosted frequency that a single core can reach as long as thermal and power limits allow it when you need the extra juice this type of dynamic power on-demand design isn't unique to intel either nvidia GPU boost boosts the entire processor rather than redirecting power from one part to another but similarly looks for sufficiently low power consumption and temperatures and increase of performance on demand pretty cool stuff eh speaking of pretty cool my CPU when it's idle yeah sorry no awkward segue today since our sales team didn't manage to sell an add integration on this video so that's all that's left is for me to thank you guys for watching pathetically beg you to like and share the video or dislike it if you hate it I think that's fine too and remind you to subscribe if you haven't already see you next time