Factors that can affect performance
Main factors
- Clock speed
- Number of cores
- Cache memory
Clock speed
Every cpu activity is begun with a clock pulse. The more of these clock pulses there are per second the more instructions can be ran. Speeding up the clock speed will allow the processor.
Number of cores
If there are several cores in a CPU, the CPU can then run more than one instruction at once.
Cache
Cache allows for the CPU to store data and instructions closer to the CPU which is faster than fetching from primary memory.
Types
There are different levels of cache.
- Level 1 - Fast but small
- Level 2 - Fairly fast but larger
- Level 3 - Some CPU’s have this
Pipelining
Pipelining allows for the CPU to fetch the next instruction whilst executing the current instruction.