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Notes -
How do you tell whether a CPU is better or worse (other than whether it's more or less expensive)?
With graphics cards, I know that there are more or less CUDA cores or their AMD equivalent, that there's a certain amount of video ram. More is better.
But with cpus, what is there? More cores = more expensive but most applications only seem to use 1 core so what's the point? All CPUs are roughly 3.5 Ghz, maybe going a bit higher on the most expensive models or if you overclock them. I heard that some CPUs manage to get more done in their herz, like the difference between a lamborghini driving a hundred km but only taking two people, vs a truck carrying a dozen people somewhat more slowly. Some CPUs have efficiency cores for background processes or OS, whatever that means. I get that higher numbers means that they're better but how are they better?
I don't know of a good way to work it a priori. I guess chip designers must have a way to be reasonably sure before they make the chips that they'll be faster than their predecessors.
But generally you'll want to use benchmarks, like https://www.cpubenchmark.net/. Benchmarking software runs a computationally expensive test, which is ideally somewhat representative of real-world workloads, to see how a given CPU performs. This is complicated by systems with the same CPU having different other components, but I assume they adjust for that somehow.
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