Games are a good example of what he's talking about. The amount of threads running at a given time will vary during the game and there's dependencies and bottlenecks on specific threads which would hold up processing the frame. It gets complicated but it's why there's such a diminishing return on adding cores versus higher IPC/frequency.
I know what he meant. I'm only guarding the terminology.
Games use few threads because they run separate threads when possible. One thread loads data for locations, one runs AI, one feeds data to GPU, one runs the sound. And so on.
And of course some of these threads are so light (or activate so rarely), they won't apply a significant load on the CPU. So even if a game runs 200 threads, it may only use 1/3 of what a 3900X has to give. Which people incorrectly interpret as "game using just 4 cores" (hence: "badly optimized" or "promoting Intel").
That's sometimes called "task parallelism", but it kind of forced naming. It doesn't scale with the problem.
We've been doing task parallelism event with single-core CPUs, because the goal was not running many tasks at once but rather in a more optimal order.
Disappointed. Still no Intel 8c/16t part under 100 watts. Sticking with my E3-1265L v3 for some longer.
If you really don't want your CPU to pull more than 100W, get a motherboard that lets you set PL2 (it'll have some weird naming, e.g. "short duration package power limit").
And if you have a motherboard like that, getting a -T CPU suddenly makes a lot less sense. Just grab the normal one and set PL1 and PL2 accordingly.
Standard and -T SKUs cost the same and the latter is usually harder to find.
-T SKUs mostly make sense for OEMs and when your BIOS doesn't allow setting power limits or clocks.
And of course if the mobo maker gave that -T SoC a PL2 over 100W, it'll can boost over 100W anyway. I bet both 9900T and 10900T are capable of that.
Intel's default (recommended) formula is PL2 = 1.25 * PL1, but probably all OEMs ignore it.
I've used a slim 8700T desktop from Dell and I'm pretty sure the CPU pulled more than 44W.
Facebook
Twitter