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choutiy

A dumb question:

Why don't we see machines with say 3 cores or 5 cores that often? Is there a specific reason to have 4 cores, 8 cores, 16 cores, etc.

lazyplus

@choutiy: There are some commercial products with 3, 6, 10 or 12 cores. You can refer to here. Also, recall that GTX 480 has 15 cores instead of 16.

Given the transistors doubles every 18 months, it seems more reasonable to have 2^x cores. But if a company is willing to push out new product in the middle of the 18-month cycle, it have to end up with less cores.