What is the significance of processor speed on computing?

Answer 1

The system mother board has a clock speed; two to three-times this is usually the memory speed, and four-times this is most always the Front Side Bus (FSB) speed. Think of an 18-speed bicycle. The lower the gear ratio the steeper the hill you can pedle up. For the CPU it is the higher the CPU Core speed the more computer instructions you can process. The point is... how many instructions/how steep is the hill you have to deal with; will determine how important getting that next CPU core multiple of the base clock speed. CPU core speed multiples is more like the bike going down-hill, sometimes you just can't peddle fast enough to keep your feet on the peddles. Most of us don't really have the data cruching need for that extra $100 or $300 for those fractions of a second we will save going from a core multiple of 9 to 10 or 11 times the board frequency; which is also the ratio of speed boost, 10:11 is not much of an improvement. Most important is getting the computer with the features you need. When it costs a $100 more for the next CPU core multiple and your only speending $100 on a video board or only getting 512 MB of memory... get the $200 video board or get the 2 GB of the fastest memory... for your system mother board!

Answer 2

When measuring speed, one must be careful about what you are measuring. In most cases, what you are interested in is the amount of work that a given CPU can accomplish in a fixed amount of time.

This can vary widely by CPU, and it primarily dependent on six things:

1. Clock Rate of the CPU - that is, how many internal operations-per-second (nowadays measured in GigaHertz) does the CPU perform
2. Number of available calculation units - generally speaking, those CPUs with more execution units can perform more work per unit time than those with fewer execution units. Typically, these days we measure this in "cores", though this isn't technically correct. This speed is dependent on the specific workload, so you really need to know what the typical workload of the CPU is, before this metric can be applied.
3. Size of on-die caches - larger L1, L2, and L3 caches speed up memory access, which leads to faster performance. There generally is a law of diminishing returns in cache size, so bigger will not always give you better performance. In addition, certain workloads are too big to fit into any reasonable cache size, so the performance of the CPU isn't affected by cache size for those workloads.
4. Design of the CPU bus protocol - certain CPU bus protocols are more efficient than others, and improvements in bus protocols lead to faster communications between CPUs (in a multi-CPU system) and/or Memory and/or I/O subsystems.
5. Size and speed of the external buses - the "width" of the buses (as well as the clock rate of such buses) attached to a CPU heavily influences the ability of the attached subsystems to get data to the CPU. Data starvation is a primary cause of perceived slowness in CPUs.
6. Design of the CPU subarchitecture - engineers are continually refining and improving the internal design of the CPU itself. Later generations of a CPU are almost always faster, due to improved layout or new innovations which make calculations faster (even given no change in any of the other above factors).

Answer 3

The procesor - is the 'brain' of the computer. It allows each separate component to 'talk' to each other - to enable the computer to do the tasks the user has asked it to do. The faster the processor's speed - the greater the number of instructions it can perform per second.

Answer 4

The speed of a CPU depends on the number of core processors and the speed at which these run ( generally measured in GHz). The higher the speed, and the more cores, the faster it will go.

Answer 5

by the computer screen and if it cuts off in is not working

Answer 6

The processor speed determines how fast a program runs. The more clockspeed a CPU has the faster it reads the instructions.

Answer 7

All data used by a computer is going through the CPU. the larger the cache size and the higher the clock speed, the faster your PC will operate.