Hello all,

I'd like to know why aren’t cpus at a native speed of 4ghz yet?

I mean come on, since the P4 days, there hasn’t been any jaw dropping RAW native speed increases. Sure there’s multiple core's and drastically improved memory/bandwidth techniques used, but the way i see things panning out, I can understand why nvidia/ati want push past the cpu barrier and take on some of the rolls that of the cpu themselves.

A good example is with the gtx280 and the ati4870 where they're both heavily bottlenecked with today's highest native cpu speeds and is pretty much a requirement to o/c your cpu to the 4ghz region to see any decent improvement compared to the last couple generations of gpu's.

I hope amd's and inte'ls next cpu offerings will change all this, because as it stands now, its nearly a waste of money buying new graphic cards if the cpu just hasn’t got the balls to feed them.

its harder to get stability with +3.0ghz while in control of temperature/voltage...

but realistically, we've moved far far from p4, to the point where a p4 at 4.0ghz is outperformed by a c2d at half that speed, so really there's no need for us to get higher clocks when we are improving performance from clock to clock.........
again a pentium d a 2.2ghz is destroyed and raped by a c2d at 2.2ghz

and no, bottleneck in those extremes only occur with extremely high end cards such as 4870x2 in extremely low resolutions like 1280x1024... i mean why should someone with that card be playing at those resolutions anyway?

Raw processor frequency is just simply not the way to go anymore. Both AMD and Intel have put their R&D dollars to work on getting more instructions per clock and cramming more processing cores into a processor package.

A single Core 2 core against a single P4 core at the same frequency would be a total bloodbath in favor of Core 2.

AMD was the company that gets the credit for breaking us of our GHZ addiction. They showed us with their Socket A processors and model rating system that their processors would outperform a higher frequency processor. Ever since that time we have relied heavily on benchmarks to tell what processor is better.

Also, as software writers start going multi-threaded (Photoshop, encoding, newer video games like Crysis) we start to see huge gains from multiple cores. It will take a while for software to catch up, but it's happening as we speak!

I beg you to look at performance results, not processor frequencies.


I hope that helps.

If frequency is what you want, Look into IBM Power series, they've had 4 and even 5 GHz for a while

We don't all have power plants in our backyard and liquid nitrogen pumped to the house like natural gas. How are we supposed to overclock when the chip is already being pushed?

ahh sweet, thanks guys, yea i've got a p4 lol going to upgrade soon the near future. I'd thought id give it as an example of speed i guess because im seeing people recieving far better scores from these gpus when they've insanely overclocked their duos and quads to 4ghz, off air, making me think gpus are better off at these speeds then compared to 3.2/3.6ghz.

If you run at 1920x1200 with 4xaa all on max, you aren't going to see much difference going from 3-4GHz. Maybe in FSX, but that is a coding horror.

Because it costs so much to support forum kittahs we cant afford power plants in our backyard and liquid nitrogen pumped to the house

Go back to your hole you bastage! (But continue to fund my LN2).

Were those 280s and 4870s overclocked too?

While thats generally true, its not an exact truth. Theres several things that make that too general. First off, if youd said or added "for acceptable fps" itd be more true, but even then theres a few things Id like to point out. Using the 4870x2, you cant say that 4xAA has a major effect on that card, as it barely does at all, and many times less than what youd get from a higher oc. Also, once DX10.1/11 comes out, 4xAA will be a moot point, and will give a capable cards a nice fps boost. So far, the only game weve seen it used in, it showed a 20% boost, tho those cards werent very good at AA to nbegin with, and I havnt checked the performance difference on the 4xxx series, which can be found at TR when the 4xxx series was released, as they included the DX10.1 benches on the 4xxx series as well. Needless to say, it made the lower 4850 either beat or come close to the G280, which shows the improvements.
Theres plenty of benches that show the 4870x2 and sometimes the G280 as well still seeing improvements no matter how high the cpu is clocked. In some games, this is important, in most, its not.
One thing a higher oceed cpu will do no matter how good its multithtreaded is in the minimum fps, which is the more important use of fps anyways, so saying higher clocks isnt the way to go, or even higher IPC, isnt true, but mainly due to the law of physics, multithreading is forced upon us, as cpus just cant go much faster, at least until we find a better material to make out cpus from

Why would DX10.1/DX11 make 4x AA a moot point? From what I read a while ago DX10.1 just made support for 4x AA mandatory and nothing more.

Its part of the DX model. It allows for fewer passes required, thus adding to or if you will reducing a cycle from the gpu. Remember, its not just a SW requirement, the gpu has to compatable, HW compatable

Unfortunately, the biggest loss IMO we will see from cpus not having higher clocks or IPC will be the inability of a lessor card to reach those acceptable fps, but more important a good gpu with a challenging game wont see improvements in minimal fps, which in the past, if the game was gpu bottlenecked, the cpu could pick up a little slack with the minmum fps. So until multithreading arrives, we will see more of this, as were seeing some of it already, just not enough to worry about, tho if you can crank your cpu up, sometimes it gives you a smoother experience by lifting those minimum fps