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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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?

Then theres the instructions per clock and the cache and yada yada.

Just use benchmarks of what you plan on doing if you dont plan on getting a computer engineering degree anytime soon.

But if you want a dumb heuristic, then just multiply IPC, n_cores and clkc_freq