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
Speaking specifically about cpus, these days it comes down to what you’re doing with the computer that dictates if it will perform well. These days you can buy everything from 4 core through to 96 or more core cpus, all with differing speeds and other specs. But it comes down to what you’re trying to do. Most consumer software is still designed to run on a single core or a small number of cores, so in these cases CPU speed does matter. A CPU with a faster clock speed will run a single threaded application faster (assuming all other components are equal).
But software designed to run in parallel on multiple cores can get away with lower overall clock speed because it has broken the problem up into more parts, so it’s through putting more than the single threaded application at the higher speed.
Adding some real world examples. In recent years one of the best cpus you can get for gaming has been an 8 core CPU with decent clock speed, even though there are 12 and even 16 core CPU options priced above it. That’s because most games can’t make use of that extra cores so there is no point paying for them. However it you’re building a workstation that will do a lot of multitasking, you’ll want more cores with high speed so you can do more.
The other components matter a lot too. Consider how monumental the change in boot speed was going from traditional hard drives to solid state drives. The speed that you can read and write data makes a huge difference in how fast the computer can complete tasks that deal with large amounts of data.
Ram plays a big role too. Some simulation software is bottlenecked mostly be how fast you can move data between CPU and RAM. And a computer with more memory channels will run a simulation faster than a computer with a higher clock speed but fewer memory channels.
All of that is a long way to say that you need to match computer specs to the tasks you want to do.
Latest Answers