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

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