Characteristics of CPUs

Notes made on this video: GCSE (J277) 1.1 Characteristics of CPUs

Notes

Clock speed

• Clock speed measured in Hz

• Numbers of cycles per second

• 3.2GHz = 3.2 billion cycles per second

• Not exactly one to one.

Size of cache

• Temporary storage for data and instructions

• Located on board the CPU

• Copies of recent data + instructions

• Faster than RAM

• Saves time

• Very expensive

Number of cores

• Simply, a core is a complete copy of a CPU

• CPUs w/ multiple cores can process multiple instructions at once

• More cores = more instructions processed at once

• Have to stay in time with each other

• Many programs can't use multiple cores