How does frequency on a CPU impact performance? I.e. if I overclock a 2Ghz CPU to 4Ghz, is it +100% performance?
In: Technology
pretend you can only work on cleaning your room when your friend Billy comes over. He doesn’t come over very often so you can’t work on cleaning your room very often, so it takes a long time to clean your room.
Now imagine that he can come over once a day. You can get your room cleaned even faster now.
Now imagine that he can come overo 10x a day. Your room is going to get cleaned up much faster now!
CPU frequency works the same. A computer can only do 1 tiny piece of work every time its clock ‘ticks’. The amount of work it can do in a ‘tick’ isn’t much, so the faster the clock ‘ticks’, the faster the computer can get work done.
The clock’s frequency is measured in this thing called ‘hertz’ (denoted ‘Hz’) that means ‘how may times per second’. so 10Hz means ’10 times per second’.
GHz means “billions of times per second”. So a 2GHz computer can literally do 2 billion things a second. a 4 GHz computer can do 4 billion things per second – literally twice as many things.
THat’s why a 4GHz computer is much faster than a 2GHz computer.
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