– 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

The clock speed is just how long a “tick” inside the processor is. It’s the number of smallest-possible operations the thing can do in a second.

It doesn’t actually tell you very much about how much work is getting done. A lot more goes into performance than just counting really fast. More CPU cores, more on-board cache, faster memory access, video adapters to take load off the CPU, faster disks, and more useful instruction sets all make a processor faster in practice, even if the clock speed looks lower on paper.