MEPX
Chapter 2 of 10All chapters
  1. 1The parts
  2. 2The processor
  3. 3Memory
  4. 4Storage
  5. 5Graphics and parallel work
  6. 6Motherboard and buses
  7. 7Power and cooling
  8. 8Finding the bottleneck
  9. 9Laptops and phones
  10. 10Choosing hardware

Chapter 2 of 10

The processor

Cores, clocks and instructions.

What the numbers mean

Clock speed is cycles per second and cores are independent execution units. More cores help only when work can be split; a single-threaded task cares only about speed per core.

  • Instructions per cycle differ between designs, so clock speed does not compare across generations.
  • Hyperthreading lets one core interleave two streams, which helps some workloads.

Architectures

x86 dominates desktops and servers, while ARM designs lead phones and now laptops for their efficiency. Software must be built for the architecture it runs on, or emulated at a cost.