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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A processor does work more or less as fast as the work gets to it. Modern processors are really, really fast. The issue is that it is so fast, it sometimes runs out of work.
Imagine if the parts in the computer are all connected by conveyor belts. All the parts want to send their stuff to the CPU to get worked on, but if the conveyor belt going from one part (system memory, for example) is slower than the processor is working, then it can’t get work to the processor fast enough.
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