Once upon a time, when multicore processors were novelties, multicore was motivated by the simple fact that it was impossible to keep raising the clock frequency of processors. More “clocks” simply would result in an overheated mess. Instead, by adding more cores, much more performance could be obtained without having to go to extreme frequencies and power budgets. The first multicore processors pretty much kept clock frequencies of the single-core processors preceding them, and that has remained the mainstream fact until today. Desktop and laptop processors tend to stay at 4 cores or less. But when you go beyond 4 cores, clock frequencies tend to start to go down in order to keep power consumption per package under control. A nice example of this can be found in Intel’s Xeon lineup.
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