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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This is what generally is referred to as Bottlenecking.
A bottleneck is where a particular step in the process holds up the entire process. A computer is lots of components talking to each other, and if those other components can’t keep up you’re going to have a processor that is spending a lot of time waiting for instructions.
Other components that can slow down a processor are:
a. RAM, Random Access Memory. RAM needs to be able to keep up with the processor to some extent. Both in terms of “how many cycles per second can your RAM do” and latency (how many cycles does it take to get a response). While processors do have some internal memory (the L1 and L2 cache) to speed up processing those caches are very limited (like, 512k per core normally. Or even less).
b. Bus speed. The Bus is kind of the highway of the computer. Everything travelling from one component to another goes over the bus. Motherboards tend to be designed with a certain level of components in mind.
c. If you need to retrieve lots of different data, then how fast memory is retrieved from the harddrive matters.
d. Processors are generalist machines. You can connect specialist devices to them that are much better at particular tasks, like a GPU. GPUs are especially good at handling calculations related to graphic (hence the name) but some other tasks as well (so for example machines mining crypto will tend to use high end GPUs because those have more cores that does the stuff they need).
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