WIll Heat/Workload, make a dual core processor run a-sync?

[forcemac101]

Back in the day of P3, I played around with the Abit VP6, the P3 only suported Symetic Multi Processing (SMP), and I remember seeing people asking about if they could throw a 750Mhz part and a 1ghz part together...and of course back then you couldn't do that.

Fast forward to today, with these new dual core processors, do you think that somehow that workload or maybe heat build up leading to clock throttling would force one core to different speed than the other? I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing with my P-M laptop and noticed how much the processor sped up or slowed down based on load. Then I started to think about how this would affect dual core chips, especially from intel which said they borrowed some techniques form the P-M to keep heat down.

Anyone know how they keep the cores from getting a-syncorous from each other?

 

[Scali]

Well, they probably use just one core frequency for the entire die... so that probably means that throttling will affect both cores at the same time.
That would be the simplest and most logical solution, I suppose (throttling both cores would also reduce heat and power dissipation more).
Else they would indeed have to solve the problem of the CPUs running a-sync.

 

[steviep]

Actually, I read something about the second core completely turning off when the CPU isn't under load...

 

[Scali]

Actually, I read something about the second core completely turning off when the CPU isn't under load...

That could be yes, I heard that about the dual-core Pentium-M... But that's easier to manage than running two cores at different clockspeeds. The system is always synchronized.