– 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

another thing to account for when trying to understand cpu speed is IPC, Instructions Per Clock, a modern processor runs more instructions per clock than a legacy one, so that might explain why a modern single core @2.4ghz does far more work than a legacy single core @3.5ghz

then you have cache, cache optimization, integrated memory controler, and a bunch of other tricks to make the cpu faster, back in the days, processors did exactly what they where told to, nowadays processors have a very advanced scheduler that runs code “just in case” then scrap it if it’s not needed

processors are really complex these days, I suggest that you research about older processors and the optimizations that followed, a good starting point might be the Intel 486 processor, ask ChatGPT and validate the information using Wikipedia and official sites from Intel and AMD