1.1.2 CPU Performance

Question 1

What is the clock speed?

Answer 1

A computer’s Clock speed is how quickly the CPU goes through the FDE cycle and execute an instruction per second

This is measure in gigahertz (GHz) - a billion

For example, a CPU with a clock speed of 3.0 GHZ can process 3 billion cycles per second. A higher clock speed usually means a faster CPU

Question 2

What is the cache size?

Answer 2

Since it is quicker to fetch instructions from cache compared to main memory (RAM), if we were to have a larger cache size then more instructions can be stored

This means a larger cache size increases the CPU performance as it takes less time to fetch instructions

Question 3

Number of cores

Answer 3

A core is an individual processing unit with a CPU, responsible for executing instructions and performing calculations

There are numerous types of CPU from a single core, a dual core, a quad core to a multiple core CPU

More cores allow a computer to perform more tasks at the source time (this is called multitasking), which improves the performance

The applications that run on a computer must know how to use more cores to run multiple tasks at the same time