Engineers boost AMD CPU performance by 20% without overclocking

Using a new technique, engineers have been able to take the strengths of the CPU and GPU and improve performance by up to 20%.

To achieve the 20% boost, the researchers reduce the CPU to a fetch/decode unit, and the GPU becomes the primary computation unit. This works out well because CPUs are generally very strong at fetching data from memory, and GPUs are essentially just monstrous floating point units. In practice, this means the CPU is focused on working out what data the GPU needs (pre-fetching), the GPU’s pipes stay full, and a 20% performance boost arises.

This will be interesting to watch out for as AMD is already going down a similar road.

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