CPU Characteristics Flashcards
what is clock speed and what is it measured in
this is how quickly the CPU will carry out the fetch decode execute cycle. Hz
what determines the Clock speed
the CPUs clock chip where the vibrating crystal maintains a constant rate.
what is overclocking
every CPU has a base clock rate that can be increased if you can keep the CPU cold. Overclocking makes the CPU do more FDE cycles
How does the cache affect the speed of the CPU
the RAM is too slow for the CPU so the cache stores instructions because it reads at similar speeds to the CPU. the larger the cache the faster the CPU is
how does the CPU get data to the cache
if no data in cache, control unit requests data from RAM.
What are cores
A core is basically a processing unit.if you have a 4 core CPU then it can do FDE cycles four times at once. makes the CPU faster.
how does the CPU process more instructions with more than one core (parallel and multi-tasking)
Parallel processing - same program can have two instructions processed at the same time.
multi-tasking - each core can process two different programs instructions at same time
what are the disadvantages of more than one core
if the program isn’t written to allow parallel or multi-tasking then it can only process one instruction at a time.
