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
1) You can do something every time the clock ticks. In fact it’s the pulse of the “tick” that makes things happen. ie; imagine pressing a button and that makes everybody in a factory do one thing…lift an arm, move one foot. So the more times and the faster you click, the more you get done.
2) Engineers have come up with ways to make CPUs do MORE THAN ONE THING per clock tick. Therefore a CPU from 10 years ago maybe could to 1000 things simultaneously today you can do 5000 things simultaneously per clock tick. Therefore you can use fewer clock ticks
3) Why you want slower, but more efficient CPUs. It take more power and creates a lot more heat the more you click the button. So being more efficient per clock tick and lowering the clock speed allows you to not push the envelope of the power/heat usage. ALSO, the reason some things are more efficient is because there are more “things” packed into a CPU to do more tasks, but that means they must be smaller too, so that means you have to use a slower clock speed to avoid problems with the smaller components (transistors actually) BUT since each thing does more things per clock tick, it works out better.
ELI5 Imagine a factory with 1000 robots in it. Each time you clap, the robots EACH do one thing. Say they are making toy cars. One robot grabs a wheel, one robot attaches a wheel, but it takes multiple movements to do each thing (move arm. Open Hand. Lower arm. Close hand on wheel. Lift arm. Move arm to car. Push wheel on car). So the more you clap, the more things get done. The faster you clap, the more claps you can get done in an hour, and therefore the more toy cars you can make.
Fast forward 10 years. Now you have 5000 robots in a factory. But you’ve also made things more efficient. Now when a robot picks up a wheel, another one picks up the car, then they move the car and the wheel together in one step, then they attach the wheel. Also, each robot now has three arms instead of two. With each clap, they can actually do three things.
CPUs are similar. Plus part of the efficiency is in the progrmming too. For example. Say your task was to make either a red car or a blue car based on if a customer was a boy or a girl. You would first check if the customer is a boy or a girl, then based on the answer, you would paint a car red or blue. What you do instead is this. When a customer arrives, you make one red car, and one blue car. When you look to see if the customer is a boy or girl, you give them the correct car and throw the other one away. OR you keep the other car and immediately make another ar of the opposite color, to prepare for the next customer. Now you are much more efficient as you are only ever painting one car at a time and you do it in advance of finding out if the customer is a boy or girl.
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