Why can’t manufacturers just add more CPU’s to make the computer faster?

931 views

Why does

Two CPU’s != Twice the power

In: Technology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Throwing more cores or CPUs at the problem only works if your problem is that the computer can’t perform enough calculations at the same time.

For most tasks performed by personal computers, there are logical reasons why you can’t perform multiple tasks at the same time (in parallel) and must perform them one after the other in sequence (in serial). And in those cases you can only perform the task quicker if you can do the individual calculations faster. If your job is to add 2+5, and multiply the result by 10, you can’t do the multiplication by 10 without knowing the result of 2+5.

If you and your housemate are driving from your house to a restaurant, you won’t get there in half the time if you take separate cars.

Having multiple cores on a single CPU is fine for consumers who only have a handful of programs open at a time, most of which need to do serial processing. In some certain cases, like back-end servers for web sites and business software, virtual machines and such, they can make better use of more threads and CPUs. Which is why server hardware often supports two or more CPUs. But even then it only works to a certain point, because those CPUs also have to share the other system resources like memory, storage, GPU, networking etc which can only handle so much processing/data, and all those components talk with each other via the motherboard’s various [buses](https://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Hardware_Software/computer_bus.asp), which also have a limit as to how much data can flow.

You are viewing 1 out of 6 answers, click here to view all answers.