– 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

What matters is how quickly the processor can do things. You can make the clock speed faster or you can make the CPU do more things per clock cycle (IPC or Instructions Per Cycle/Clock)

Stuff/time = stuff/cycle * cycle/time

A lot goes into those, but that’s it at the most basic level