Disabling Core i7 cores

Peter G. 1 Dec, 2008 at 11:41pm ET Article published in Tech

Comments

1. 
   1 Dec 2008 ~ 11:56pm DrLiam Would have never expected an odd number of cores would be the sweet spot for games. Yet, across the board it looks like Duel Core is all you need to get buy in the gaming world today.
2. 
   2 Dec 2008 ~ 12:02am BuddyJ Yep. In gaming, a dual is perfect at the moment. More than that and I consider it future-proofing. Of course that's all just hope that companies will start taking advantage of multi-core chips.
3. 
   2 Dec 2008 ~ 12:46am Khaos Interesting thing to note is that some of these games they tested do make use of four physical cores, but they do it to distribute the load. For example, Far Cry 2 on a quad core hits a max load of 4 x ~47%. This has some benefit in that it distributes heat and command frequency, which makes the processor more efficient in theory because it leaks less current and has to perform less error correction. Less error correction means less L2 cache reads per command cycle on average.
   
   Now, the bottom line is that these differences are meaningless when viewed in terms of Frames Per Second -- and thus they are meaningless to gamers who just want bang for their buck, but I thought somebody might be as fascinated by the details as I am.
   
   

   TweakTown wrote:

   I really wonder if this was a similar conclusion to what AMD came to when they decided to release tri-core CPUs. It was just unfortunate that their technology wasn’t up to the standard that we had become accustomed to, or they could have become a real winner in the value for money department.

   Tsk, tsk. AMD's technology has been light years ahead of Intel for years, ever since K8. The problem is fabrication more than anything else. The fact that AMD stayed even remotely competitive while being an entire process generation behind Intel, coupled with the fact that Intel basically adopted the core tenets of the K8 architecture for i7 and improved upon them, proves this point beyond doubt.
   
   The fact of the matter is this: AMD does not design fabs. They design processors. Their IP -- their technology -- is their processor designs. If they could afford to produce them smaller, and thus faster and more power efficient, they might have had an answer for the Core 2 series.
   
   x64? AMD.
   Integral Memory Controller? AMD.
   Uncore concept? AMD.
   Shared cache? AMD.
   On-die dual core? AMD.
   On-die tri core? AMD.
   On-die quad core? AMD.
   
   Massive fabs? Intel.
   Better fab tech? Intel.
   Better market position? Intel.
   Better implementation of other people's technology? Intel.
   
   But alas, it's all woulda, coulda, shoulda, mighta.
4. 
   2 Dec 2008 ~ 8:18am Thrax I'm sorry, I disagree. Any way you slice it, the Phenom is just slow. Clock for clock, it's an inferior chip, and it has nothing to do with fabrication size. Just because both chips share many similarities, the Core i7 borrowing liberally from the Phenom, does not mean the Phenom was/is a good CPU.
   
   It's not.
   
   It's plain sluggish.