thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button then enable
notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos it's no
secret that marketers really like numbers whether it's horsepower on a car
screen size on a TV or the number of items on the buffet there's this general
idea that people are drawn to large numbers and computer processors are no
exception if you're shopping for a new system it's pretty easy to find
retailers that prominently listed the processors gigahertz there's just one
small problem it's basically an utterly meaningless metric these days and has
been for at least the last 10 years now we touched on why you shouldn't just go
buy raw speed when you're buying a processor in this video but we're gonna
go into it in a little more detail today first off speed in megahertz or
gigahertz measures how many clock cycles a CPU goes through each second and a
cycle is basically what happens when an electrical pulse hits your CPU allowing
it to execute instructions and keep its activity in sync with the rest of your
system so this means that a processor rated at 4 gigahertz can handle a
billion more cycles per second than one rated at 3 what's simple enough to
understand but things get more complicated when you consider what
happens during a clock cycle one big
determining factor of a CPUs performance is how many instructions that can
execute per clock cycle modern
processors can work on more than one instruction at a time - thanks to
pipelining which you can think of as being similar to how an electronics
factory can turn out a huge number of smart phones per day even though it
might take a long time for one phone to make it all the way through the assembly
line so different stages of production are pipelined to take place
simultaneously so that the guy that installs the screen isn't constantly
waiting around for the next phone to work on pipelining in CPUs is similar in
principle but quite a bit more complicated and engineers use different
methods to allow the processor to chop up instructions into parts that can be
worked on simultaneously or even combine
smaller operation to complete them in fewer cycles increasing efficiency
exactly how this gets accomplished depends on the specific
microarchitecture of the processor which can learn more about up here but
bringing things back to the topic at hand it means that because the number of
instructions per clock cycle and the pipelining efficiency can very enormous
ly between CPU brands and even the individual models from a single brand
clock speed can end up being very deceiving CPUs also need to be able to
read ahead on the page so to speak to work efficiently modern programs aren't
all that linear and need to be able to respond to many different user inputs
quickly I mean just think about how fast you expect your PC to show you the right
thing after firing your weapon after someone else throws a grenade in a high
budget video game so CPUs are designed to examine out of order instructions and
make sure that they're executed such that they don't interfere with other
parts of the program as well as to anticipate what instructions might be
needed next a feature called a branch prediction CPUs with better branch
prediction can have significantly better performance and again this is something
you simply won't be able to determine just from looking at the clock speed and
there are many other factors that tie into the performance as well like the
type of RAM that is supported the types of instructions that are supported
remember with MMX and CPUs can come with
different types and amounts of cache memory you can learn more about it up
here but basically it's this super fast memory that stores small pieces of data
that the CPU thinks it will need in a hurry so a processor with a well
implemented cache can fetch things it has to work on much more quickly finally
if you're working on CPU intensive tasks like video encoding or file compression
having many cores to spread the workload
out and crunch more data in parallel can speed things up more than a clock speed
boost now don't get me wrong clock speed shouldn't be ignored completely if it
was totally irrelevant there wouldn't be a thriving community of overclockers
trying to squeeze as many megahertz as they can out of there chips for dem
performance gains and it can be a useful indicator of performance as long as you
are only using it to compare CPUs with the same microarchitecture features and
number of course or if you are compensating appropriately for the other
differences that exist the point is just that it shouldn't be a huge factor in
your buying decision just like you probably shouldn't choose a car based on
how many cupholders it has that is unless you really like fast food
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