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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Think of your processor like the engine in your car. Turn the engine faster and the car moves faster – simple, right?
But what engine is it? What are the gear ratios? You could probably make a lawnmower engine move a car if you gear it low enough and the engine will certainly be spinning really fast, probably faster than a V8 in the same car but the V8 will certainly be faster than the lawnmower engine.
Even if you have the best car with the best engine, you can still get stuck in traffic and slowed to a crawl
For your computer, the processor is one of the critical parts of the computer but it can only do so much on its own. It needs memory to store information and the memory can only read and write so quickly. It also needs to access information from long term storage or other computers which takes time and it may have a separate specialist processor like a GPU for some tasks. All these separate parts are joined together by other components called buses and they can only communicate so fast.
Even if you make the processor (CPU), GPU and RAM as fast as possible and load everything into RAM to eliminate network and disk access, the GPU, RAM and CPU can only work together as quickly as the bus allows. Putting the best parts on the cheapest motherboard that will hold them is like having a massive city with no major roads between residential, commercial and industrial areas and constant traffic problems – it no-longer matters what each part can do alone because they can’t share information fast enough so they keep waiting for the message to get through from the other parts
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