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
You say you have an understanding of clock speed so I’ll skip most of what I was going to say but…
In regards to increases in clock speed, you can think of the clock speed like the ticking of a real clock, and each tick the CPU can do some kind of logical operation, think of it like small maths equations.
Many parts of the CPU rely on these equations and in order to work each part must be in sync with the speed at which these equations happen – each tick.
If you tried to do two of these equations within a single tick, you couldn’t because it would not be in sync (as this is limited by the physics of electrical current in the transistors). Instead, Intel/AMD etc have added another core that has it’s own clock, so now you can do both equations in the same time – a single tick – but they’re done in physically different processing units.
If you take a look at other CPUs like the X3D line, you’ll notice they clock lower but have better perf in certain workloads like games. This is because different programs are programmed differently, and so some see little benefit from doing more calculations per second (maybe they simply aren’t doing a lot), but instead want to access lots of data very quickly. Now you get increased performance without increasing the clock speed.
Having more cores or clock speed is never strictly better or worse, it depends on the architecture, the program, and the instruction set of the CPU (ARM/x86).
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