– 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 can cook burgers really fast to feed an army. But someone needs to make the burgers for you. So you can only go so fast.

What if you had two burger makers, now you are the bottleneck. What if instead of you just i replaced you with someone but they cooked at the same speed the burgers were made? What if you now had two of those burger makers and two of those cooks, what if those two cooks got faster but the maker didn’t? Add another maker…

See the point? Clock speed is only good if the rest of the system can keep up. At some point it’s better to add more, slower cooks and makers.

Sure you can learn to go really fast and the maker can go really fast to feed that army, but that requires you to not rest, stay cool, and not rest.