– Why does clock speed matter on a CPU, and why do some top-tier CPU’s have lower clock speeds than some from nearly 10 generations ago?

Question

I have a good understanding of what clock speed is, but why does it matter?

For the second question, I was wondering since for example, the new i9-14900K has a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz, whereas my previous desktop CPU, the i7-4790K, had a base clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Why hasn’t this number steadily gone up thought the years?

In: Technology

Answer 1

You order Doordash and your driver drives at 100MPH. Your food gets there really fast. He could go even faster but it would take a lot more fuel (power) to go even a little faster.

This is ok though because you’re the only person ordering food so your food is delivered at full speed.

Eventually, more people start wanting food delivered. More drivers sign up to delivered but there’s a problem: There’s only 1 road for all the drivers to drive on. This severely slows down the delivery of different foods to different people. You could increase the cars speeds and the speed limit but this becomes more expensive and more dangerous (cars/programs could crash).

So, instead of increasing the speed, we increase the size/amount of roads so more people can drive as close to full speed as possible.

This is essentially how threading works on a processor. You can also add more driver hubs (cores) so your delivery can come from the closest and least congested route possible.