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!
In: 97
Imagine you’re moving, and you’re the sole person in charge of putting things in boxes, but you can’t leave the room (the CPU). Even if you’re super fast at putting items in boxes, there are a couple of bottlenecks:
* How quickly can people bring things into your room to pack (Hard drive to RAM read speed)
* How much space is in the room for people to bring stuff in (Amount of RAM)
* How long your arms can reach before you have to get up and move (CPU Cache)
* How long it takes for people to go around the house to find stuff (Hard drive access speed – less of an issue nowadays with SSDs)
* How efficiently you stack/fit the items in the box (processor architecture)
* The number of people available to take the packed boxes and put them into a truck (GPU bandwidth)
* How quickly those people move (GPU speed)
* The size of the truck (GPU RAM)
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