Hello, everyone! I’ve been doing some research into computer hardware lately, and one thing that I keep coming across is this idea that the speed of a processor, while important, isn’t the only thing that affects a computer’s overall performance. I’m having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this because I always thought that a faster processor meant a faster computer. Can anyone explain why this isn’t necessarily the case? I’m really interested to learn more about this!
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To perform multiple operations. If you only had a 1c1t cpu you could only do one thing at a time. You can sort of psuedo multitask by having the cpu go back and forth between doing small portion of operation a and a small portion of operation b. However this is not ideal, and not actually asynchronous, so instead we opt for more cores and threads to perform more operations.
Another is thermals. If an individual cpu core gets too hot then the operation can me moved over to another available core that isnt as hot.
Another is divying up the cores. To run something like a virtual machine you need to allocate it some cpu cores, so you need some for your host system then some for the machines youre virtualizing.
There are quite a few reasons why having more cores is a benefit. However, that doesnt automatically mean more = better. Some programs, usually older ones, benefit from higher clock speeds. It doesnt matter if you have 8, 16, 32, 256 cores, not all programs take advantage of all those cores, so if their clocks are slow, you can expect slow performance.
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