Why CPU GHz Doesn’t Matter!
Vložit
- čas přidán 9. 05. 2024
- Go to nordpass.com/linus and use code LINUS to get 74% off a 2 year NordPass Premium plan plus 4 free months!
Get your Arozzi Occhio True Privacy webcam today at: lmg.gg/ArozziLTT
There is a lot more to IPC than just clock speed, so we took two AMD CPUs with the same core count and similar speeds and pitted them against each other. How well will they perform when underclocked? The results might surprise you!
Buy AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU: geni.us/Lhrsi7j
Buy AMD Ryzen 5 5600X: geni.us/ZFWZpe
Buy G.Skill Trident Z RGB 2x8GB 3600MHz: geni.us/Gy0Ws
Buy Noctua NH-D14 CPU Cooler: geni.us/dEBnul
Buy ASUS TUF Gaming B550-PLUS: geni.us/EWsV
Buy Crucial P5 1TB NVMe SSD: geni.us/f3mjDr
Buy SeaSonic X750 Gold PSU on Amazon: geni.us/mplXt
Buy EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC: geni.us/6KDNz
Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.
Discuss on the forum: linustechtips.com/topic/13764...
► GET MERCH: lttstore.com
► AFFILIATES, SPONSORS & REFERRALS: lmg.gg/sponsors
► PODCAST GEAR: lmg.gg/podcastgear
► SUPPORT US ON FLOATPLANE: www.floatplane.com/
FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE
---------------------------------------------------
Twitter: / linustech
Facebook: / linustech
Instagram: / linustech
TikTok: / linustech
Twitch: / linustech
MUSIC CREDIT
---------------------------------------------------
Intro: Laszlo - Supernova
Video Link: • [Electro] - Laszlo - S...
iTunes Download Link: itunes.apple.com/us/album/sup...
Artist Link: / laszlomusic
Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High
Video Link: • Sugar High - Approachi...
Listen on Spotify: spoti.fi/UxWkUw
Artist Link: / approachingnirvana
Intro animation by MBarek Abdelwassaa / mbarek_abdel
Monitor And Keyboard by vadimmihalkevich / CC BY 4.0 geni.us/PgGWp
Mechanical RGB Keyboard by BigBrotherECE / CC BY 4.0 geni.us/mj6pHk4
Mouse Gamer free Model By Oscar Creativo / CC BY 4.0 geni.us/Ps3XfE
CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
0:57 The Test
1:59 5600x Faster, Why?
3:10 The Takeaways
4:15 If Not GHz, Then What?
5:15 IPC
7:16 CPU Design Factors
8:40 The Solution?
10:10 Outro - Věda a technologie
Does CPU GHz matter? No, but yes. Maybe.
Ay hi harry love you
Maybe
When is the new meet the Cores
да нет наверное
That could've been "long story short", but you forgot Nord Pass.
I love how any question related to PC components can be answered with "it depends"
It just goes to show the complexity of what goes into PC components... There is a reason it takes massive companies with numerous engineers to make these things
Well that depends
No, there could be the answer "wear depends" to someone saying the FX8380 is the fastest CPU for clock speed.
@@sniperlif3 well that depends
@@sniperlif3 you mean 9590
Mad respect for sharing the names of literally every competitor at the end there.
Well are they really compeditors? Its not like you cant watch more videos a day than Ltt uploads, and the only competition that really exists is the subscriber amount.
I just think it's a nice gesture under "industry colleague's"
Why in the hell was ijustine there though 🤔
Why isn't OC3D TV not in the list?
Not really. Some of those names thoroughly test things, while others on there just say how much they like to use a phone or computer and don't run any tests at all. They all do tech content, yeah, but differently, Linus is in the middle.
Pauls Hardware got shafted tho
3:30 There’s also this pesky thing, the speed of light. At 10GHz, the distance light (and therefore the maximum anything can go) can travel in a single cycle is about an inch. That would really complicate design and require much smaller, denser, board designs.
Computers work with electrons which is not the same as light. Photons are the light particles and much faster than electricity (electrons). That’s why there are talks of making a paradigm shift towards light based computers
Oh.... who needs LEDS when you can do a submerged build and have a cherenkov blue! ;-)
@@JoseDiaz-tf2ql The electrons themselves travel slower than the speed of light (slower than a person walking, even, for that matter), but the speed of the electrons isn't the speed of the electrical signal. The speed of the electrical signal is the speed of the elecromagnetic field fluctuations, which are close to the speed of light.
@Muse Axe Backing Tracks amd supposedly has 4nm cpu's coming out end of the year with 3nm on track for 2022 and 2nm in development
@@GregHib Intel also has a chart where they call 2nm “the Angstrom era of CPUs”, as the improvements would be too small to be measured in nm
My wife says that size doesn't matter but I say you can do more work at a given frequency.
Lol.
Lmao
🤔
LMAO
69 likes 😏
The analogy I've always used, is that if CPUs were cars, comparing clock speed would be like comparing RPM. 10,000 RPM is quicker than 5,000 RPM, but gearing makes all the difference.
...and 10k RPM on a single piston .5 liter engine is way less power than 5k RPM on a 7 liter V8
Great analogy!
I feel like that'd be really helpful if I was any good at cars, haha!
That's actually a really bad analogy, it would be like comparing a 4 cylinder from the 80 to today the hp jump is pretty insane, but they should pretty much pull the same shit.
Cores are like cylinders. Clockspeed is like RPM. IPC is the power produced by each detonation.
In 2008 a professor in my engeneering degree proved with math using the light speed that the cpu coreclock won't be going nothing crazy in the following years, 14 year later, our home/pro cpu's really stayed around the same clocks...
To be honest, I have been watching Linus for like 5-6 years now from the time I built my first PC to today being a major in computer science, and the amount of knowledge I have gathered over the years from this channel is nowhere near what someone can learn in a decade or two. I am very grateful we have people like Linus and his crew nowadays teaching this information for FREE on the internet for people to have a broader mind and understand some things more than what is just advertised for the general public to know. With all due respect to Linus, the Canadian guy over here I understand just why he is so successful and how much work, information, and investments he put into this channel to make it comparable to real-world education.
Well said, but remember its not free. You've been brainwashed with ads in exchange for knowledge.
If Linus or others like him weren't in the space, Companies would have milked people their money for sub par performance rigs to sell
Unrelated but
My hypothesis is true that what you watch is how u shape your mind. Example if you watch videos like serial killers you'll likely to be one. But if you watch videos like this computers you'll likely end up with it. As for your comment just watching linus made/inspired you become a comsci major. I'll be watching relevant stuff now 😁
Putting that list of tech reviewers at the end just shows again why I love Linus!
Cos your gay?
Hahaha jk
You replied really fast... Guess I really triggered you huh?
@@jesus2621 don't you want a thick rtx 3090
Also, they didn't even put themselves as a reviewer. The obvious thinking is "well we know they review stuff, and we are on their channel" but other youtubers include themselves in lists they make a lot of the time.
Just once I want to hear Linus call them "Jiggly-hertz"
That MEGA HURTS my feelings.
@@TurboGoth oh god no
Ayeeee
Jigglypuff?
Sounds like a pretty weird fetish.
I remember back in the 1990's, MHz (and later GHz) was the big bragging point (HA! my i486-50MHz is way better than your i486-33MHz). Then somewhere around the early 2000's it just seemed to stop mattering, ads stopped promoting it and people stopped talking about it. I always wondered the reason it kind of became a non issue.
My old 386 had 8Mhz but it came with a Turbo button to get 25Mhz and what can i say, games did fly with higher speed.
And how a 486 DX3/100Mhz was faster than a 486 DX4/100Mhz !
@@FLYSKY1 what generation you are
@@stateofdecay2210 1984
@@FLYSKY1 so you are walked on computer and lived on keyboards from the first moment of your life :))) I thought you are at least 60 years old one of the pops :)))
I've always used the toll booth analogy.
I'm not sure how accurate I am, but I've always said clock speed is like how fast each car can get through a booth, your cores are how many booths you have, and your threads are how many lanes you have.
Depending on the process that goes through, you could potentially only be able to utilize a couple lanes regardless of how many you have (like if only 2 lanes are open that day) so speed matters a lot more than if traffic was able to split up and utilize all the booths.
Can't you have cores that process more per clock than other cores?
It's funny how they're basically so complex that the easiest, most efficient way to calculate their performance is to just run them. And we can't even agree on what we're trying to measure 😅
Yes. Summary of the video.
i figure if i buy a cpu in a specific price bracket, and come back in 3 or 4 years and buy another cpu in the similar price bracket, its usually an upgrade. this is not accounting for the semiconductor shortage of course, adjust accordingly.
Easier to us. The manufacturer sure knows how to measure them properly but this isn't good for the business so... here we are swimming blindly.
@@LordSevla The thing is that the actual performance improvement in a specific application cannot be predicted easily even if you knew exactly what was changed. You also need to know exactly what instructions some program uses, in which order, etc.
Sure amd and intel can predict improvements, but until they actually run it (maybe in a simulation), they don't know exactly.
A single core has many optimizations already built in.
There is branch prediction (predicting the result of a conditional jump to another instruction) and with it speculative execution. Then there is pipelining, each instruction is split into for example 5 steps and a single core can then run each step at the same time. So up to 5 unrelated instructions can be executed at the same time. With that comes out-of-order execution, where a cpu can run an unrelated instruction a couple instructions later actually before to fill gaps when related instructions follow each other.
Different applications have a different reliability on cache, memory latency, etc.
Thats just what I remember out of my head. There are so much more things to consider. For example with Zen 3, they improced tje amount of loads and writes they can do per cycle etc. etc.
@@LordSevla Of course proper measurement is good for buisness, that is absurd.
Anti-Marketing 101
"The larger the font of a statistic the less it's likely to matter: the smaller the font, the more likely that stat is going to be a significant factor for smart shoppers"
That's why I always ignore the front page of an item site and go directly into detailed specs.
Goodhart's Law is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The non-simple version: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
@@rehhouari x2
Is this why more relaxed work environments are able to get better results?
@@rehhouari Ditto
@@oscarh.405 yeah pretty much
I really like the mining analogy. That was amazing.
I'll just leave a shout out here to the guys at Gamers Nexus and their unending dedication to push the envelope of proper testing methodology and journalistic conduct.
I really don't like Steve, but my god do I respect him and his team for what they do and how they do it.
@@JKSSubstandard If only they would present their stuff in a more engaging way instead of reading numbers from graphs minute after minute in this monotone voice. That being said, in the reviewer list there are people like Steve and Roman (der8auer) and then iJustine who unboxes sponsored Apple hardware and goes "woooow it is so beautiful" - lmao. And for some reason the list cuts off at P, I guess bad luck for everyone past that :D
@@JKSSubstandard I think I can see the reasons why. The great thing here is that while one might not find him sympathetic, his numbers are always spot on. And in the end, that is the most important thing, the sweet sweet data.
Who doesn't like Steve? Gamers Nexus videos aren't always the most entertaining, but when you are actually looking to make a purchase their channel is the best for comparing similar products - especially cases
@@ethanml33 yeah, but that content would probably be better delivered in an article and not a video, like e.g., Igors Lab does.
As a computer engineer, this video was spot on. A lot of the topics mentioned in this video prefaced all the cpu architecture classes I took. Nice work LMG!
Agreed. I like the fact that Linus obviously actually understands the topic and is *explaining it* not just reading off a script.
Very glad that branch prediction was mentioned. I personally would have considered touching upon the topic of Instruction Set Architectures though (eg. RISC)
@@alanevans403 They are obviously reading off a script. Why do you think that's bad? Something can be both explanatory and scripted.
@@Cryptix001 I think he is referring to the fact that Linus probably wrote the script himself, or, at least, was somehow involved in the writing of it.
Yea this is like 8th grade computer science I learned back in the early 90s, basic information any enthusiast should have learned on day one.
Does CPU Ghz matters?
Yes only when compared within their own family(for example comparing cpu's of intel family)
You should never compare cpu's or gpu's Ghz which belongs to different family(like comparing a cpu of AMD with a cpu of intel).
So what about comparing i5s to i3s? Or generation to generation?
@@anxiousearth680 IPC improves each generation and corecount increases as well so you can't really compare different generations
And an i3 consumes less energy, and has less cores and is designed for other areas of application compared to an i7 for example so they're also not really comparable - even though they should perform the most similar when looking at a single core bench with the same clock speed
Furthermore efficiency and the layout of the chip improve from generation to generation
@@jodamin Yeah the number of cores is more important than clock speed for sure. You can get a dual core pentium or AMD processor pushing 3ghz and they're slower than an Intel I5 quad core running 2.7ghz like the one I've had for a long time.
@@gravemind6536 Unless you have games/applications that only support a single core.
Shouts to Dawid Does Tech Stuff. Perfect example of the up and comer getting a mention - I love the wide range of tech youtubers!
I first thought the “retro” part of the retro tshirt was that no one can get a GPU, instead of the retro artwork style
you might've been overthinking about it too much
Me too brother.
Remember when you could go to the store and buy a GPU :(
Same. lol
They should have just included it as out of stock on their website :P
Overclockers be like:
"And I took that personally"
It's weird they didn't address tht in the vid
Does anyone know wtf is going on with these bots? either its one of these or those who spam that islam video.
@@Masa. my guess is posting replies to comments is an efficient way to mine traffic, since replies aren't modded as heavily as actual comments
Buildzoid: More caps, more better.
@@fringeanomaly9284 2:03 They started off the vid with underclocking two different CPUs side by side to show the effect of clock speed. Overclocking is the same thing in reverse but generates more heat.
Thank you for the honesty, including the needed ADs, as always.
I don’t really judge by Ghz as such I typically judge how the strength of the individual cores in benchmarks, as well as reviewers using the said processor to run the programs/games I’d wanna use. It’s not easy to determine the power of a cpu being low except for when it can’t keep up with your usage. Not really sure how else to go a out it tbh. But I just get the CPU I feel I’ll need personally. I could’ve bought an i7 8700K back in 2018 but I chose an i3 8100 because it was just pointless having the extra power I wouldn’t take advantage of
OR WAS IT THE MONEY !!!
The world needed this. I’ve had arguments with people telling me an overclocked pentium would have better single core performance than a Zen 3 CPU running at a lower clock speed. A lot of people don’t know about stuff like IPC.
You've had arguments with idiots.
I could see a very heavily OC'd Pentium G3258 beat a Zen 2 chip in single treaded performance no problem but not Zen 3 chip, that is asinine.
The funny thing is that these days I'd bet a Pentium would be bottlenecked by IO speeds before its IPC becomes an issue.
Well, typical clueless intel hardcore fans. What can we expect 😂
From benchmarks, my Ryzen 5 3550H (4c/8t, 3.7GHz on boost) actually performs worse than a i5-7300HQ (4c/4t, 3.5GHz on boost) on single core tasks.
This 4-5 years old i5 can beat my 2 years old Ryzen 5 on single core tasks (on some games, my Ryzen 5 can only reach 60% of the i5 performance).
But the Ryzen 5 can easily beat the i5 when it comes to multithreading.
Thank you linus for telling me Clock speed doesn't matter, now i can finally be proud of my 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 :D
I don’t think he said clock speed “doesn’t matter.”
My 0.79GHz Intel Pentium makes me cry
@@TheMrMeeks Video is literally titled: "Why CPU GHz Doesn’t Matter!"
@@Nauzhror1216 and yet he clarifies in the video that it still matters 🤔
@@TheMrMeeks Irrelevant, he still said it didn't matter. Saying two opposing things doesn't mean you didn't say one of them.
I know ltt is the largest tech channel out there but them listing a bunch of other creators out there to spread the love really shows why this channel deserves every sub.
I think they recently solved what was really going on. It turns out that some of the previous recommended paste wasn’t that great as smaller form factor of cpus would turbo inconsistently due to the molecules of the paste not making enough contact in the very small channels that are on the surface on current CPUS. I believe Linus has a newer vid covering it.
Thank you for including me in the list of reviewers. I didn't expect to see one of my channels listed. That made my day.
"And that brings us to IPC."
"Oh, I know that, Inter-Process Communication."
"Instructions Per Clock."
"Screw you tech acronyms!"
Ha, I thought the exact same thing. I was wondering how it was going to be relevant
Fat Cat!
software vs hardware, those initialism exist in different namespaces. In human programming language titling the video something hardware related is functionally equivalent to "using namespace hardware".
I've been where you are and I'm still going through this every now and then.
@@BlastinRope This comment is so geeky and odd, it almost feels as if an A.I trained with programming books wrote it.
Thanks Linus, your explanations are so much easier to understand.
Thank you very much for this video. Helped me out alot. Just upgraded my ram and figured out my gpu only supports 3rd gen pcie. So was already looking into switching to a 5600x. But may not be any need now
My core i3-4030U looking down at an i9-9900k : finally a worthy opponent.
Imagine buying Intel lmao couldn't be me
@@horacegentleman3296 congrats..?
@@horacegentleman3296 yeah nah, nor me. i couldnt possibly have bought intel
@Vinícius Felipe Posselt is amirite new mineral?
@@horacegentleman3296 I just bought Hp Omen with ryzen 5 4600h, 1650Ti and my father was telling me to buy the one with an Intel i7 9th gen🤣
Such a big man that he's advertising other tech reviewers
Feel bad for my man Dave2D
And as experts! :)
Wait Ijustine is a reviewer?
Isn't she an Apple fangirl!!
@@makisekurisu4674 An Apple Fangirl + Reviewer. Nothing says she can't be both lol. At least she's useful for honest opinions that other Apple fans will relate to
@@SofiNabeel xd
What Linus is suggesting is exactly what intel and AMD do now and it makes identifying how one cpu performs vs another. Back when CPU’s was called something like a 386/16 or a 486/25, everyone knew 386 or 486 was the processor’s class and 16 or 25 was the clock speed in MHz. CPU’s of this era also had the letters DX or SX added after the MHz to indicate whether the CPU had an integrated Math CoProcessor on the die or installed as a separate chip.
Later, once intel introduced the Pentium class of processor, AMD and other competitors CPU architects became less of clone of intel and began to diverge performance wise. Rather than label their CPU with a lower MHz than intel, AMD and others began to use a number that was supposed to indicate what Intel CPU’s performance they matched, so a CPU may be named C6-266, it was only 166mhz, but the manufacturer would prefer you to ignore that fact and instead focus on the 266, so you can pretend like your CPU is actually 266MHz. Eventually, after intel ditched the Pentium moniker for their processors, they also began using an alternate set of numbers to indicate relative performance instead of MHZ. That is why we don’t have an intel CPU named Core2Quad2.4GHz, we have the Q6600. Same reason we have the AMD Phenom 8320 instead of the PhenomOctaCore3.5GHz. intel introducing the Core i series processors and AMD introducing the Ryzen line of CPUs has only made it more confusing.
They should just keep making the numbers high so we know which ones are better lol
Actually 386 never had integrated math processor. SX had 16 bit data bus and 24 bit address bus while DX had 32 bit o both. In both 386 and 486 the SX versions were introduced to kill competition that made faster versions of the older chips. Intel actually had 487SX math coprocessor which actually was a full grown CPU that disabled the original CPU.
So basically, CPU GHz is kinda like the engine size.
Nice to have, sounds good but not really only determines the performance.
Actually engine size matters, size=torque=acceleration , sound is a bonus.
@@alexalexftw That's the reason a Tractor accelerates faster than a F1 Car, right?
@@DaroriDerEinzige now you miss the other part which is the transmission , in a traktor the transmission has low rotation but very strong so it can carry heavy stuff , go learn before arguing.
@@alexalexftw So, therefore engine size doesn't really only determines the performance?
@@DaroriDerEinzige The worst F1 racecar is still faster than the best and most efficient tractor.
Talking about CPU's while having a GPU shirt on. Love it xD
I don't love it xD xD xD 😑
They are all processing units, what does it matter
@@sharul1709 wow can't believe you ain't gay and love Linus
what?
I don't get what is notable about that.
Haha so funny 👍👍
The miner analogy is great for overall subject matter. I have found that higher gigahertz sometimes can beat out IPC in situations where latency is a bigger factor. Like competitive shooters. If you think of where the miner has to take the ores to. Say the trucks outside. Having a faster worker who can take faster trips down and back up might be more beneficial than having more per pile. Because a truck can only carry so much in one load. This is also why that cache analogy matters. Bottlenecks happen on many levels in a computer.
This is the difficulty of computer performance. Sometimes edge cases will forever be edge cases. But sometimes overall lapping in areas of an industry where a certain methodology of improvement is preferred. Might be better, because some areas develop slower than others.
in fact it often does in some codes. Real world is more complicated, including memory bandwidth. So I belive that the future will be about optimizing designs for specific tasks and having heterogenous cores. Chiplets can help in that sense. An interesting example is IBM Power10 it can run 8 treads per core. It's simple a throughput beast. Apple A15 is another case: let the integer resources the same, but invest a bunch of transistors on AI an increase graphics by 50%.
No, Gigahertz will never beat IPC. If you don't believe me, try a 5 GHz AMD Bulldozer CPU and see how that turns out. :-)
Higher frequency can sometimes be an advantage if and only if the IPC is very close between the two CPUs, but the truth of the matter is that this is hard to tell. There are too many variables in a PC that can tip the scale one way or the other.
@@ruxandy in some codes it will. For example a fully pipelined loop operation with a small dataset will run faster in simpler CISC machine than in a superscalar one, since there is no horizontal parallelism to exploit. Clearly one can always go to extremes but within reason it will. I selected CISC because it has memory memory instructions. Without that we need to remember that the horizontal parallelism of memory access and operation was one of the most important reasons for superscalar designs.
@@ruxandy this is the conundrum I explain in my second paragraph. Many factors can interrupt true performance gains from practical to principle. Changing the architecture, changing the cache, changing the frequency. The term never is a strong statement to make. Especially when there are millions of programs that all perform differently. Sure, maybe higher frequency will never beat IPC in theory, but in practice there’s way to many variables to truly nail down 1 king of performance increases. High competitive shooters were the ones I tested for and found my results.
This is very simply not true. A cpu operates at multiple million clock cycles a second. Even a fluctuation of a million or two cycles per second won’t, on it’s own, ever result in perceivable latency. What matters is how many frames the cpu can process in per second. If a processor running at 4ghz can do 200FPS, and it’s competitor at 5ghz can do only 100FPS, then the one running at 4ghz has a 5ms lower latency than the one running at 5ghz. What matters is the end result, as I think this video quite accurately explains.
Thank you for the Layman's analogy on the basics of how CPU's actually work.
Hey some of the additional heat (if not most of it) with higher frequencies is generated by the higher switching losses within the transistors, which rise with the switching frequency. so not only faster switching requires more power to charge and discharge the FET gates but also switching losses are higher with higher frequencies because during the charge/discharge time the transistor is in a transition between off and on, where it has a significant resistance which leads to heat dissipation.
I’m so glad that Linus has made this video I’ve been telling all my friends for years that size doesn’t matter
"It Ain't Size That Matters, It's How You Use It"
- Serious Sam
In electronics, unlike some other areas of life, it's actually the smaller, the better. 😉
@@chrisdpratt not really
My wife says my 3.5ghz works just fine. She's a liar.
@@ThatShitGood wise man
This was a techquickle but instead repurposed as a full video that goes in depth. Yes! more!
I remember when we (at work) were doing a hardware replacement of our IBM 3090 mainframe with 3 CPUs which was being replaced by a IBM 9672 with a whopping 10 CPUs but barely half the speed. Our lead tech guy thought it was crazy and would never work. To say the least, there were some performance issues as we figured out how to tune the system to run on the new hardware. After we adjusted the number of read /write threads on the database (on the old hardware I think the number was 1), it performed wonderfully. So well in fact that our storage subsystem was now the bottle neck in getting maximum through put. A few years later, I remember trying to test out running UNIX on the mainframe and the Unix engineer I was working with was convinced that shared memory wouldn’t be enough-8 years later they were running virtual Unix machines just not on the mainframe. I find it fascinating that so many of the innovations that I saw 30 years ago with mainframes are now happening with home computers.
One of the best and most instructive videos I've seen you guys do.
I know it would've taken a while to come up with a miner analogy, which came really close to the actual CPU. Little things matter a lot: L1, L2, L3 caches, inclusive and exclusive caching, branch prediction, interconnect bandwidth, IPC, clocks per cycle, and the architecture itself. These things are so complicated that it would take an average person 1 to 2 years of studying just to know how they actually work.
bet tony stark can do it over night XD
And that's _only for the CPU itself._ All of the other components can also affect CPU performance in varying ways, and that includes the enclosure.
@@sonicboy678 I'm glad you mentioned this. I buy equipment for my company and I get so tired of dealing with this issue. I'm really good at my job and have 35 years experience in electronics. I do calculations and specify exactly what I want for each order. I check inventories and make substitutions if needed, so I'm aware of market conditions. Oftentimes the vendor substitutes equipment saying it's the same, due "market conditions" which always means they got a deal on bad equipment that smart IT guys have rejected. In one instance, they substituted Intel 4770 CPUs for Intel 4790s, stating that the differences were too small to worry about. However, when we deployed them we got a lot of complaints. We tested 5 machines in our environment using actual user workflows, some disk intensive, some cpu intensive, some multithreaded, some not, and found that the 4770s took 3 times longer to complete disk intensive workflows, and they always took at least double the time to compete any workflow. The tests ran for 7 days, giving consistent results. Even with that measurable evidence the vendor claimed they were basically the same system. The motherboards were altered slightly by Lenovo so they could fit them into cheaper cases, and substituted generic RAM for Crucial RAM, so I don't know the specs. The coolers were the same, The chipsets, video, nic were the same. I don't know if the performance difference was solely due to cpu or if multiple issues such as the board design, RAM, or some firmware changes may have also affected it.
I only have 1-2 hours. Explain it like I'm 5.
@@JeffLeonard0 the only differences between those processors I know of are the paste under their heat spreader and the clock speeds.
So informative! I had some questions about this subject recently and this answered just about all them. I totally get it now and know how to be skeptical of this spec going forward. Which is all you really need.
Of all the things of learned from LTT and similar channels, the ability to finally understand spec lists is one of my favorite.
I appreciate the list of other tech channels near the end.
I like your miner analogy. When I used to sell tech to people I would describe it like this "imagine a three year old walking next to their mom. Each step a 'clock cycle'. The three year old takes a bunch of little fast steps to keep up with mom taking one or two large steps. If you're just counting steps then the three year old is faster, even though the mom is traveling a further distance with each step."
This is a great conversation to have when comparing CPU's. This is exactly why AMD branded their Athlon XP chips the way they did in the early 2000's.
Russel Kasem
the XP and x64 Athlons, bad chipsets killed them, too many bugs
unable to keep up with the mighty Pentium 4HT giants, HOT!
Core 2 just wiped AMD away... gone forever now....
TSMC now....
Yes, while the very first Athlons were numbered after their Mhz, the Athlon XP used a numbering scheme that reflects what similar performance for non-XP Athlons. For example, the Athlon XP 1500+ would be 1333 Mhz but it's suggested to run as fast as a regular Athlon if it was OC'd to 1500 Mhz.
@@lucasrem Those Nvidia NForce chipsets were pretty solid if I recall. But really my whole comment was regarding the campaign Intel had at the time when they used the clock frequency to differentiate themselves from AMD. On a box a Pentium 3 at 1.8Ghz was "better" than an AMD Athlon XP clocked at 1.4GHz (1800+) because in the eyes of consumers, clock frequency was everything.
This reminds me of Steve explaining the “megahertz myth” about 20 years ago. What’s old has become new again!
Conclusion: Steve's hair is timeless
How old r u?
Steve started the Star Citizen interviews 20years ago?
@@johnconnor4486 who is Steve?
@@daddyelon4577 if you asking this question, better give up computing now
I remember when clock speed was the key factor in speed. And my old x486 with a turbo button taking it from 33mhz to 66mhz. The good ole days!!
That made a lot of sense. I started with computers back when they were single core and frequency was the biggest driver of speed. Today I found out the tricks manufacturers use to increase overall speed that does not change frequency.
"Why CPU GHz doesn't matter!"
3 minutes later: "GHz absolutely matters."
3:14 lol
Yeah, this was a really long way to say, "architecture and boosting made a difference."
Why CPU Ghz doesn't matter (when comparing different CPU skus)
Ghz absolutely matters (for "a" CPU)
its a clickbait title...
@@Gromran Linus has admitted that his titles are click bait, just to increase people watching his videos.
Hey I think this was a great video! I think it could’ve been improved by directly calling out 2 computer architecture laws that were touched on by the mining analogy:
1. The Iron Law: performance = (cycles/instruction)*(time/cycle)*(instructions/program)
2. Amdahl’s Law: total_speedup% = 1/((1-portion_enhanced)+(portion_enhanced/speedup_enhanced))
Thank you so much for this
What I know is a CPU architecture is going to have an effect on this. What I also know is there are many programs that deal with data processing that can break data up into chunks, and the faster you can clock the cores, usually the faster you can process the data, up to a point. If this functionality can be maintained in L1 - L3 cache so you don't take the IPC hits from going to RAM, then faster core speeds make a difference. Rendering video is a good example. In which case, the instructions/program has no bearing because the thing that takes up a long time is the actual render, which is running a small number of functions when it's doing that merge of video with whatever it is that's being added to the video, such as CGI.
What I also know is the title of this video says I can clock a CPU at 1GHz or 5GHz and it doesn't matter. Except it does, so I didn't bother. I'm trying to stick to a low "sensationalist" diet right now, and simple logic says that every CPU architecture is going to hit a limit, to where some part of that architecture won't give better performance once the cores are clocked to a certain point, but for some architectures in the past that point couldn't be hit in gaming, because power consumption would become too great before that limit was hit.
@John Doh that's why so much work goes into lowering power consumption. they had a Pentium 1, or 2, and I forget what it was, overclocked to 5ghz! I think the power draw was 700 watts, just on processor. They are trying to scale alot better today like a balancing act.
The average watcher isn't going to have a good frame of reference for these laws. You'd have to spend a lot longer explaining what speedup actually is, big(O) etc. This is basically an accessible TLDR video.
This video :
"Which is faster a spider ontank tracks or a tank on spiderlegs?" The answer is it depends on the race course...
For anyone wondering, at 6:20 is a character spreadsheet from Pathfinder: Kingmaker, a great crpg.
Finally someone that explaines this in a way that is easily understandable. Thnx^^
Not to mention SW optimizations and specialized accelerators on CPU. For example AVX instructions don't run at the advertised core frequency but can process specialized workloads much faster.
Video decoders and matrix accelerators are two that are entering the market at full speed. And yes SW optimization can lead to orders of magnitude performance gains in extreme cases.
TLDR: IPC (instructions per clock) matters, and so does GHz. But not one without the other.
Overall CPU performance = clock speed x IPC x number of cores.
@@hubertnnn Not exactly, no. If all you do is single threaded workloads like browsing the web and gaming, it doesn't matter if you are on a 6 core 5600x or a 16 core 5950x. The difference would be negligible, despite one having more than double the cores & threads. Number of cores has no relevance to real world performance in day to day applications, unless you are a power user into 3D modelling, compiling, rendering, video editing, etc. which is less than 1% of all computer users around the world. For most people, core count does not matter these days, especially as the lower-end CPUs start having 6 cores/12 threads and such.
@@jonny6702 It depends on the workload.
But that is the property of that workload, not the CPU.
The era or single threaded applications is already gone, so you can assume that other than some low budget indie games and old games everything will be multithreaded.
Plus web browsing is multithreaded for last few years too.
@@hubertnnn Yeah, but web browsing still doesn't need more than a couple cores even for things like video playback.
It doesn't matter if you have a 5600x or a 5950x for web browsing, and it wont for as long as that hardware is relevant.
Also, it's very hard to make games multi-threaded which is why most use 6 or less threads. It's very niche for a game to actually be able to efficiently utilize a lot of threads. It's not feasible for most games due to the nature of how video games operate. There's a limit on how much you can reasonably multi-thread before it makes things less efficient. In other words, the benefit goes down as you increase thread count because you make it increasingly hard to synchronize all the work loads. Only stuff that doesn't need to be syncrhonized can easily be multi-threaded, and that isn't a lot of the games workload overall. That's why most games will have 1-4 threads that are really dominant, and maybe a few other ones that do light work. Gaming will be single-threaded dominant for as long as current hardware is relevant.
My point was that the things that 99% of people use their PC for will run just as good on a modern 6 core as a modern 16 core. That includes gaming. Sure, there are a handful of niche games out there that have good enough multi threaded support to use more than 6 or so threads, but even then, there is probably less than 5 games on the market right now that will use more than 12 threads - all of them being simulation/RTS style games that have a gameplay that allows for multi-threading. A 6 core processor is fine for that.
99% of people don't need to look at core count on modern processors as it doesn't make a difference for what 99% of people are doing. Literally only power users use multi-threaded heavy workloads. That's it. Single threaded performance is all that matters for 99% of peoples real world use cases for Windows.
Depends on the application, Games generally love clockspeed compared to core count. Productivity workloads is inverted.
Just when I was looking for a video to help me explain the field of computer architecture to my friends
I loved the video, but I'd also really enjoy a companion video with more deep-dive-elbow-greasy-nitty-gritty details about how the current two current-gen competing high end architectures, well, specifically _how_ they process things differently.
And then, in a few years, when architectures change significantly, another review to compare how processing is being done then, compared to the last review. Would be cool!
Deep dives is GamerNexu's territory. Steve can recite all 17 different memory timings by memory, he'd trounce the subject in a video about chip architecture differences between AMD and Intel.
@@lfla0179 Right you are, I didn't forget about them! Their content simply takes a somewhat different form, with their narrative more focused on technical details, whereas LTT focuses a fair amount on its own pah-zazz. And, hey, if you take a look around some of LTT's/LMG's videos, well... Some of them really are deep-divers as well, although how this is conveyed depends on that video's topic, not to mention that video's presenter. After all, Linus has a pretty competent bunch of people that he happens to be lucky enough to call his employees!
Personally, I would enjoy it if either of them made such a video that I described above... Or BOTH! :D
@@inrevenant JayZtwocents is more of a IFIXIT kinda guy. Hands on.
GamerNexus dissects the corpses. Butcher the vendors sometimes. (Gigabyte psu corpse rotting on the table)
LTT is more: "if you want this functionality, buy this, if you want these other 3 things, get that another" kinda guy.
And all 3 intersect.
IPC is the main reason why AMD caught up and overtook Intel, clock speed ain't everything if the number of instructions per clock is very low.
using amd lmfao.
@@r3mxd woop woop woop lmfao
Yes, IPC is a very big factor
Take amd of 2012 for example,
Even though the fx series had more cores and threads, it didnt outperform an i5 of that age because of poor IPC performance
Same is when amd came back in 2017, at first ryzen was behind, but zen 2 and zen 3 made ryzen topple intel with its better ipc
I wonder how intel compete with its 14nm superfish finz +++++
I would say the main reason is that AMD was able to go to more power efficient and dense process nodes than Intel due to Intel's fab problems.
@@mcg6762 You can have a CPU that uses 1 watt of power an as dense as you want 1nm+++++++, if it has bad IPC then it will be trash, End of.
Well. There are other bottlenecks. Some applications do well with multiple cores and others use only 1 or few. Then there is the instruction set. SIMD and MIMD instructions give great performance boosts for tasks that require them. Cache levels and their sizes are hugely relevant. Pipelining and prefetching. How many PCI lanes are on the board. Everything plays into performance.
I thought that the first point he'd bring up would be SIMD.
Great video Linus. Explained an advanced topic flawlessly using laymen’s terms
It’s incredible how this guy had changed over the years, watching since NCIX.
Same, and out of all of it I'm just glad he doesn't look like someone Chester the Molester would be chasing anymore.
@@ebolawarrior451 true pandemic beard is making him look like a man not like a virgin
@@SimonBauer7 Ironically, He was never the VIrgin...He literally was married from the start.
It's actually Luke who was the real virgin at start despite having a beard...lol
Yup, he helped me overclock my i5-2500K.
Its been 84 years...
This has to be one of the most information dense videos I've ever seen. Great job, Linus! Excellent explanation.
The difficulty in comparing clock speeds goes back to the early days of computers. Just search for a 6502 vs. Z80 speed comparisons for an example. There has also always been a problem with benchmarks. Most benchmark software is sponsored and the tests are generally optimized to make the sponsors products look good. It has always been difficult to find an unbiaed benchmark that will give results that apply to real world use. Good benchmark results sell procuct so they wind up being more marketing propaganda than accurate measuremens of performance.
There are ways to calculate stuff - I learned it in uni and forgot again 🤣🤣🤣
But it also depends on what you are running:
How much of the work can you do at the same time? = parallelism
Imagine having workers and every worker has a speed (cpu frequency):
You have some tasks they can all do at the same time and some tasks where they need to wait until another task has finished.
So for example:
You have alot of letters that needs stamps
Every one of your workers (cpu core) can grab a letter and some stamps and get going.
So now imagine you need to write the letter first. That takes a while. And only one of your workers can write the letter.
So you can stamp Number of workers letters at once and are really fast in doing so, but you will still be super slow because you need to wait until the letter is actually written beforehand.
So the speed in this case depends more on the speed of a single worker (cpu clock speed)
In the case before (letter stamping) it depends more on how many workers you have than how fast they actually are.
In real life CPUs will always have to do a mix of both. They will have independent processes that they can just give to a cpu core and forget about it and then they have stuff that depends on each other.
For video games for example some video games are also not optimized to run in parallel
Meaning: there are things that are independent of each other and could be paralelized but aren't.
Meaning: this game will be heavy on clock speed
Some games are highly build for parallelism, so they run smoother on CPUs that have alot of cores.
So in short: it's not even possible to give a correct answer. Because it's not known hoch much parallelism vs single clock performance you actually need 🤷🏼♀️
You can give a generel guesstimate (more cores better, more frequency better) but you can't know for sure.
And this is not even considering small differences between the CPUs where the manufacturers optimize certain things. Like Linus mentioned like branch prediction ect.
But that's not even all: some CPUs are completely differently build.
Think about your phones: they use arm processors because they use alot less power! They internally work extemely different than x86 Cpus!
Long story short: it's complex
from what i remember, throughput is probably the most reliable way of measuring individual component/algorithm effectiveness
nope its simple. ghz more matter when we talk about intel and amd cpus as cisc. but for more than decade all cpus are risc that emulate cisc with microcode, so when you make faster microcode you get more performance. intel pentium was 1st that could run 2 simple instructions in one clock in parallel aka UV pipelines, pentium 3 had 3 pipelines or even 4. btw risc in 1997 already could run 7 instructions if they dont collide with each other. and now we come to exploits that allow to fool microcode, and when they started to patch those holes suddenly cpu lost 20-30% of power. modern risc cpus probably have more pipelines next today cpus have multiple cores, so if you split work to every cpu core, you can outperform faster cpu that has less cores. btw we have now 64bit cpus, but powerpc last pure risc used in xbox 360 and ps3 was 128bit. today risc i think already is with 256bit registers
Linus - "Why CPU GHz Doesn't Matter"
Also Linus - "GHz absolutely matter" 3:14
dude you cut like 1/4 of a sentence there - you are like a cheap tv station :D
@@IntruziX CNN
@@IntruziX he must work at cnn
@@justinkaufman495 -someone who watches exclusively fox
@@Scnottaken and who is that? do you think it's possible to both be in the CZcams comments and also only watch fox as a source of news? CNN literally had employees say on hidden camera that they lie and yet here you are attacking fox which last I checked nobody from fox News has been caught on camera saying they lie and hold an incredible political bias
I'm happy to see Dawid (Dawid Does Tech Stuff) in the list of reviewers. He's a really great guy.
I always welcome Dawid getting more love. He is legit one of the wittiest tech CZcamsrs out there.
I thought he was a foreign Indian guy until I clicked one day and felt silly for missing out.
@@philtkaswahl2124 absolutely! And not only that, I also enjoy his sense of humor.
@@IvanOoze1990 I discovered him coincidentally and since then, I watched almost every single video he uploaded.
The way you did that ad for the t-shirt was by far the best I've ever seen and would actually make me want to go check something out instead of being forced to either slog through RAID: Shadow Legends the greatest mobile mmo there is or skip it
Can you do a video like this about every PC component? Sort of like a playlist for people building a PC to understand more about the parts?
Shoutout to Machines and More, he definitely deserves a spot on the list
I Love your video formats!!! You guys always go above and beyond with how much information you through at us!!! The main thing I Love about your guys is you tell us straight and buffer out all the BS. Thanks guys!!! Keep up the this Video Greatness!!! Plus if you ever need someone to help build some PC's I have been doing it since x386... lol
@Linus tech tips HAHAHA Nice!!!
When I first heard about this, my professor called it the "Megahertz Myth." Processors in the multiple GHz range had only come out a few years earlier.
I've thought about seeing how far I can overclock my 5900x after my new cpu cooler arrives. Shuld be interesting going from 240 double to 360 triple fan with full size case
This feels like a long format tech quicky which I would rather see on that channel. I also understand how this concept is also an important one to people newer to the space.
This video is very timely. I was just having this discussion with a very knowledgeable person in the comments on another channel quite recently.
Even though i learned a bit better about how subjective the term "IPC" is, i realised even more that all these leaks of "such and such product has X about more IPC" are meaningless because none of those leakers know what is being measured.
It's almost a worthless metric except in direct, open comparisons - like in reviews.
Well in the end all the numbers are just there to please all the spec sheet warriors, as per usual. In the end, real life tests are what will prove true performance. It's just like when people buy cars off of reading about their sales paper describing how powerful they are, and then not giving a second thought to anything beyond that single-paged paper.
As if the performance of a pc component could be summarized in a single piece of paper in the first place.
Yes exactly as put, a cpu manufacturer can say 200% increase in ipc, but that could just be for floating point performance,
Fortunately often times ipc increase manufacturers claim are somewhat overall,
@@ignortotal360 I think spec sheet listing can be compared to puzzles that market themselves with the amount of pieces they have. Sure you get the big number, but you don't have an understanding of how said numbers interact, their individual complexities, nor the quality of the final picture once assembled. All you have is a singular metric on which you can compare with other products. No more, no less. Like with CPUs and GHz (or spec sheet numbers in general), unless you have a desicription of every single component and the capability to understand how they work together, then listing a singular metric for one of them doesn't do anything except allowing you to compare with products that are factually otherwise identical (like when overclocking). Same with core/thread count etc.
THE BEST INTRO I EVER SEEN KEEP GOIG YOU DESERVE ALL OF OUR SUPPORT
Going from a low hz count to a medium hz count is a big boy jump in performance (I.e. 1ghz to 2.8 ghz) but medium to bigger ghz jumps is less noticeable (such as 3ghz to 5 ghz)
10+ghz proceeds might be able to measure high speed events like fusion? Idk many other examples
Thank you soo much guys, after the oversimplified video on "specs you should ignore", this was a very needed clarification, and the explanations are apropiatelly deep for anyone to understand why.
3 videos in a row
All of them addressing the exact stuff i need
they know
Y'all should include a link to Pathfinder Kingmaker in the description, since you used footage of its level up UI at 6:19
I love how informative you are while at the same time mentioning some pretty dam good reviewers who aren't just bought by companies
I didn’t know Pathfinder: Kingmaker character sheets had the mining skill.
That threw me off so hard like- WAIT I KNOW THIS SCREEN!!!
@@nikkiwilliams9808 Ditto... did a double take when I saw that screen. Guess someone's a fan at the office.. lol.
Might be from an Editor playing Wrath of the Righteous since it came out this month lol
I've been watching your videos about tech coolers. Did you know they can also be used to generate electricity if placed between a hot and cold surface. Would be interested in seeing a video about that! Love the videos guys!
I found out about IPC in 2001 when the Athlon "XP" series came out. Thanks for a modern explaination
Make 5 standard speed tests. Then show average of all tests plus all five results. Modify it to be a small number something like 1 to 10 with 2 decimals.
Also use same cooling temperature.
It would be nice if there was some standardisation.
Thank you for making this. While I knew that CPU speed alone didn't matter, I was always curious what actually increased IPC.
You should do a guide on how to choose PC pieces, with this kind of "what to look for in choosing the piece" vibe!
he said what the guide is, just look at reviewers, comparisons..
More specifically in what you need, if you need a gaming CPU or a server cpu or for whatever reason, just watch which cpu performs better in THAT aspect and get it.
Always informative, thanks.
I have a 2.4 GHz celeron with a single thread it sounds like it should be faster than my phone but it's clearly not and this video was helpful to understand that.
Nice video, although I'm not sure the miner analogy really managed to describe IPC that well. In the architecture class I took in college we used a laundromat as an example where each task is a load and the different stages in washing clothes are the different parts of the pipeline. This is a gross oversimplification but essentially you can then state that IPC is directly correlated with the number of stages which can be done concurrently during one cycle. Nonetheless I like that you're trying to inform the masses on some of the more complex topics of CS and CPU architecture design.
This is a great video for anyone new to the PC gaming atmosphere and want to understand more about picking a CPU. Also, a great refresher for the OGs.
In essence - all else being equal, more clock speed is better, but the other factors are really important and so when you compare CPUs with different architectures the other factors will heavily affect which CPU can push through more data crunching.
especially in gaming, most of the processing power goes to GPU, i've disabled core boost and undervolt ryzen cpu to 890mV and my cpu running around 44c with average 30w power usage
I've always had this doubt in my mind, thanks Linus coz of you its cleared now.🔥👍👍👍
Happy to see Dawid Does Tech Stuff getting some recognition
Very well explained. Didn't know anything about IPC and now i have a good assumption what it is.
What is this music at the beginning lol the scary suspenseful minimal one? Riley? Is that you?