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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The processor often has to wait for other devices to do things before it can complete tasks. For example, it might have to retrieve information from (or write information to) a hard disk, a network connection, or the RAM – it might even have to store information in the RAM temporarily during its calculations, since the amount of data the processor can store internally is quite small. Many computers have a graphics card (aka GPU), which is essentially a separate CPU that is specialized for processing graphics. If so, the CPU essentially delegates various types of processing to the graphics card. There may be some other specialized devices that the CPU defers to sometimes too, such as a sound card or security devices.
The motherboard manages the flow of information between many of these devices, so it can also have an impact (though in many cases, motherboards are simply incompatible with newer components instead of being too slow for them).
Nowadays, CPUs are very complicated and the quoted speed (3 GHz or whatever) doesn’t tell you everything about their performance. They have different numbers of cores and different cache sizes, and they are often designed to step their speed up and down, maintaining the maximum speed only for short bursts. The computer’s ability to cool itself (depending on fans, air holes, how cluttered/dusty the inside is, the external temperature, etc.) can have a big impact on this.
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