Eli5: How is it that my CPU is operating at a 3 GHz speed but utilization is 50%, and sometimes the speed is 1.8 GHz but utilization is 100%?

Question

I mean, what’s the difference between both? Why do I never see 100% utilization at 3 GHz even when using the most resource intense tasks?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Your CPU has multiple threads. When it does one task with one thread it can go pretty fast, but doing something complex with all of its threads it uses more energy and it heats up, and the top speed goes down.

This is why on benchmarking websites you’ll see single and multithreaded speed scores. My CPU tops out at 4.8ghz single threaded but goes down to 4.5 when its stress testing all threads.