Re: The core is not the whole apple
>"Which should include the floating point units which have been standard issue since the 80486."
So 8 bit controller chips including the good old Z80 which is still available are 0 core?
You run up eight Z80 in a single machine running in parallel machine (and the old SCaMP allowed for multiprocessor use in the 1970's) and it still a zero core CPU?
Does a 'core' have to include hyperthreading to be a core? Or it has to be 128bits now? If a CPU dos not have SSE4 instructions it's not a core? The 6502 processed data without an FPU. In fact, including the carry bit it could count up and not beyond 0-511 or +/-127. So my old Commodore PET had no CPU?
A CPU is a processor that can carry out instructions according to a program.
A core does the same in parrallel using the same instruction set as the other cores.
No other definitions work.
Once you go beyond that it all just boils down to performance and that's down tot he user to decide on price and use case. AMD shared some stuff - as Intel did with the Pentium-D - so get a lower priced CPU.
My atom n3350 processor is the slowest laptop CPU on the market today (and it's been superseded by the N4000! I bought the last n3350 in the store!) but I'm not going to sue Intel for not supplying my hyperthreading, a 'proper' GPU or limited cache RAM. I know what I bought but I researched before I bought!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
