– 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

Clock speed is how fast each worker in the CPU can perform a task. As for why newer CPU may have lower clock speed, it could be because newer cpus have a lot more workers or each work can perform a very complicate task whereas before it needs to break down that task into multiple smaller tasks.