Topic 2: Processor performance

Question 1

What affects CPU performance?

Answer 1

Clock speed, number of cores and cache memory all affect CPU performance and pipelining

Question 2

How does number of cores affect CPU performance?

Answer 2

Each core is able to process a different instruction at the same time with its own fetch-decode-execute cycle, making the processor two or even four times faster with a quad-core chip.

Question 3

How does Pipelining affect CPU performance?

Answer 3

Pipelining is used to make sure that instructions are run

Question 4

How does cache memory affect CPU performance?

Answer 4

the larger the cache size, the faster the data transfer and the better the CPU performance. However, cache is very expensive.