– 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

CPU is like a counting machine. Clock speed is how fast the counting is done. The faster the counting, the faster you get the result.

It is important, but there are some other things to consider too.

One of them is memory. Imagine you are counting a lot of numbers in a book one book has one number per page, other has a hundred. You will be able to count faster with the hundred number one because you don’t need to flip the pages so often. This is called memory cache. Newer CPUs have bigger and faster memory cache.

Now imagine that instead of having one person doing the counting you have four. You can split your counting task between four of you, so even if one person is slower, four people would probably be faster. This is called core( one core – one counting person). Newer processors tend to have more cores.

Also, imagine a person can drink coffee to count faster for some time. You can’t drink coffee all the time, your bladder gets full and you may need to pee more often, but if you time it right you can drink coffee when you have a lot of counting to do and stop drinking when you don’t have that much to do. This is boosting the processor speed. Coffee is electricity, pee is excess heat.