– 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

Think of it like this, you have 10 things that need done, and each one takes a minute. You could have 1 person do the ten things, and be done in 10 minutes, or you could have 10 people each do one thing at the same time and be done in 1 minute.

Transistors are like the people here, and different chips will have different numbers of transistors per core. If one has a million transistors and runs at 4ghz, and another has 3 million and runs at 2ghz, the one with triple the count will still be faster than the one with less.