– 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

There are CPUs that can clock faster, but as you increase clock speeds, you need more and more cooling and power to get them to run at those speeds. It makes much less sense to keep increasing speeds with that in mind, especially as a consumer product. Instead, you start distributing the CPU load across more and more cores in order to use resources more efficiently. They can each be processing different instructions at the same time, and as a whole they perform a series of operations much faster than an individual core could, even though the single core might have a higher theoretical clock speed.