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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Multicore Processing

Microarchitecture hit a plateau back in 2002 when CPU clock speeds hit a

practical limit of roughly 4 GHz, motivating the CPU makers to find new

ways to get more processing power for CPUs. Although Intel and AMD had

different opinions about 64-bit CPUs, both decided at virtually the same time

to move beyond the single-core CPU and combine two CPUs (or cores) into

a single chip, creating a dual-core architecture. A dual-core CPU has two

execution units—two sets of pipelines—but the two sets of pipelines share

caches and RAM. A single-core CPU has only one set of everything.

Today, multicore CPUs—with four, six, or eight cores—are common.

Higher-end CPUs have up to 32 cores! With each generation of multicore

CPU, both Intel and AMD have tinkered with the mixture of how to allocate

the cache among the cores. Figure 3-31 shows another screenshot of CPU-Z,

this time displaying the cache breakdown of a Haswell-based Core i7.

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