Ignorance is not bliss
With all the talk of the new dualcore chips and 64 bit systems and 90nm chips, I realize that its been too long since i've paid attention to new technology... or even made the effort to learn everything about present technology... so with that said i ask for some clarifications.
Pipelines... what exactly are they, what physical part of the chip do they represent and how do u increase the number of them. Ati's new chip will have 32 instead of 24, but they can't all be used? Please explain.
64 bit. When did this happen. Whats the hardware difference.
What eactly is 90 nm in the chips? Is mentions to say just how power/speed/data much u can fit into how small a size?
Well thats all for now. but expect so more stupid questions in the future.
Pipelines... what exactly are they, what physical part of the chip do they represent and how do u increase the number of them. Ati's new chip will have 32 instead of 24, but they can't all be used? Please explain.
64 bit. When did this happen. Whats the hardware difference.
What eactly is 90 nm in the chips? Is mentions to say just how power/speed/data much u can fit into how small a size?
Well thats all for now. but expect so more stupid questions in the future.
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Comments
Pipelines are like lanes on a highway, and they are very simillar because if you have a four lane highway instead of a two lane highway you can move a much greater of volume of trafic down that road, same thing with pipelines, the more you hive the more bandwidth of information you can move through them.
On the bit about having 32 pipelines but only being able to use 24, there are quite a few reasons why. Right now it may be a hardware support issue, where the current hardware platforms are not ready to support all 32 pipelines, or. ati has a good habit of making a whole series of cards run off of the same GPU to save money, so they will just disable some of the pipelines in order to see a performance increase in the step up model. Thats why in some ati cards you can flash the card bios and open up more pipelines for free, saving yourself some mula. Other times the pipelines are disabled for a reason, such as a bad production run or defects in some chips that prevent a few of the pipelines from running, but will run fine with the bad ones disabled.
90 nm refers to the size of wire used inside the processor (I believe) an generally speaking, the smaller wire you use, the more dense you can make the chip, thus fitting more power in the same space.
I hope I got everything right and didn't make an ass out of my self right there.