worry not, 43c isn't anywhere NEAR hot.
here's a thermal guide for the Core i7 920 (Source: Tom's Hardware)
-Tcase / Tjunction-
--65-- / --70--70--70--70-- Hot
--60-- / --65--65--65--65-- Warm
--55-- / --60--60--60--60--Safe <--
--25-- / --30--30--30--30-- Cool
(This post is asking for speculation and I'm happy to oblige.)
Why not continue to just add less but faster core per chip for the same price?
The problem is that the current technology had hit its limits, so only minor
performance improvements are now possible. Improvements of 10-20% just don't sound
very convincing.
On the other hand, manufacturers do not wish to fall behind
Moore's law,
stating that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months
(with no increase in power consumption).
This needs an improvement factor of 100%, and such single-core technology
just does not exist.
Solution : Double the number of cores and sum up their total capacity,
as proof that performance is evolving fast enough by 100%.
In real life this theoretical increase of the number of cores is not guaranteed
to increase the total performance, since some computer resources are shared and
may become bottlenecks, for example the RAM, bus and disk.
What does decreasing per thread performance for the same micro-architecture brings?
Increasing the number of cores cannot be done indefinitely, especially in view
of electrical consumption. For a core to work faster, it needs more electricity.
This means that the more cores you have, each will have a smaller part of the
total available electricity and so must work slower.
The solution here is turbo mode, whereby one core gets most of the available
electrical supply. So you have one fast core and the others either turned off
or slowed down. But as one core cannot support that mode indefinitely, the
solution is to switch turbo mode on for multiple cores in rotation.
In general, for comparable technology, a CPU with fewer cores may prove faster than
a multi-core CPU, for a core-to-core comparison. Other factors may influence the
speed, but choosing between the number of cores and single-core performance is often
the question. The applicability of turbo mode to the work-load is another question.
Best Answer
Nothing, it's just a text string put in the CPU by the manufacturer. Your CPU's name is "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz". Intel generally puts the "advertised" speed (the highest speed all cores can run at all the time under typical cooling conditions and default settings) there.
The core speed drops when the CPU is not under load to keep the CPU cooler. These CPUs do have a turbo mode that is limited by temperature, so keeping the CPU cool when it's not under load helps to leave more room for upping the clock when it is under load. Your CPU can turbo up to 3.8GHz at default settings.
Intel CPUs haven't had an FSB in a long time. All Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs have an integrated memory controller.