– 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

Increasing clock speeds can have diminishing returns when compared to other options. This is because there are other bottlenecks within a computer that will make any speed increases useless by themselves.

One Bottleneck would be only being able to handle one process/calculation at a time. So rather than increasing speeds to get through each process slightly faster, you increase the core count to allow a processor to handle multiple tasks at once.

Another major bottle neck is having the really fast processor waiting for information to come along the bus from the slower memory or hard drive. So they add more cache right onto the processor which acts like really fast memory. So now the processor can just grab information right from the cache which operates at the same speed as the processor.