Originally posted by AdrianBc
View Post
Being a more complex design means doing more per clock cycle, thus consuming more power at the same frequency. This leads to a lower clock frequency in multi-threaded applications, when the power consumed by the CPU is limited by cooling.
In single-threaded applications however, the active core consumes much less than the TDP, e.g. about 50 W, and the clock frequency is limited by the single-core maximum turbo frequency.
So it does not matter that a Rocket Lake core is more complex. That will limit the base frequency to a lower value compared to a Comet Lake with the same number of cores, but that does not limit the maximum turbo frequency, so there is no reason why Rocket Lake could not reach 5.3 GHZ or even more.
Of course, there might be some details of the microarchitecture that could still limit the maximum frequency to a lower value than for Comet Lake, but we do not know yet anything about that.
Moreover, such a lower limit for the clock frequency due to logical design is very unlikely, because the only motivation for the Rocket Lake project was to reach higher frequencies, to have a chance to compete with Zen 3. Intel would never have spent so much money for this project without hoping to reach very high frequencies. It remains to be seen whether they will succeed.
Leave a comment: