COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the Gonzales Louisiana

Computer Pro – Does CPU Speed Still Matter?

If you’ve been using computers long enough, you remember when it was very important
how fast your CPU clock speed was. Indeed, the early Intel CPUs were graded directly
by clock speed, and it was pretty simple to figure out that a bigger number was better.

But while offering COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES, LA, I’ve noticed that a lot of
people are confused by the way things work today. What’s better: a 2.8 GHz dual core
64 bit CPU, or a 3.23 GHz quad core 32 bit? The numbers don’t even seem related
anymore, and it’s hard to tell which one makes the bigger difference.

In practice, you’ll generally find that your biggest choke point – dictating how fast and
well your applications really run – is the amount of memory in the system. A close
second is generally the disk bandwidth, rather than anything CPU related, and while the
major application of faster CPUs was once higher-quality graphics… most graphics
tasks have now been offloaded to a dedicated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) rather
than being managed by the main CPU.

So when performance becomes an issue, the most common need for COMPUTER
SUPPORT IN GONZALES is a lack of sufficient memory – and, on occasion, a need to
upgrade from a 32-bit CPU to a 64-bit variety which can handle larger quantities of
memory. For graphics-intensive applications, a new video card makes a much larger
difference than a new CPU.

The CPU’s primary task in modern days is not so much the operation of the applications
you run, but the management of memory areas. The more limited your memory is, the
more work your CPU has to do managing that memory, and when memory contents are
“swapped out” to the disk and back again, the processing can’t proceed any faster than
the disk can deliver that data back into memory.

There is still a significant group that needs faster clock speeds, even more than they
need memory, and that group is involved in scientific computing. When doing arbitrary-
precision calculations for chemistry or physics, especially in the biosciences, CPU
speed dramatically impacts mathematical performance – but memory doesn’t
necessarily create an issue.

But in general, the clock speed of the CPU doesn’t matter as much as it once did… and
although a higher number is still better in most cases, the one that matters most of all is
the 64-bit designation that allows you to use more memory in the system. While
providing IT SUPPORT IN BATON ROUGE, the most common reasons for
performance problems have always been available memory and disk bandwidth… even
in the days that processor speeds were easy to decipher, and “higher is better” was the
only rule you needed to know.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN

LOUISIANA. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at
GONZALES COMPUTER CONSULTANT