Computers and their parts are filled with millions of jargon's and specs making it difficult to understand them and find the right device for the right job. Let us shed some light into understanding the specifications of the core component of your computer - "the processor alias CPU"
The number of bits 32 bit vs 64 bit:
If you have not studied computer architecture this is definitely confusing for you. When you walk into buy a CPU the vendor will say that 64 bit is better than 32 bit, but you notice its costlier and you are unsure if you need it. Let us understand that by going for higher number of bits we have following advantages:
32-bit systems were once desired because they could address (point to) 4 Gigabytes (GB) of memory in one go. Some modern applications require more than 4 GB of memory to complete their tasks so 64-bit systems are now becoming more attractive because they can potentially address up to 4 billion times that many locations.
When should you actually buy a 64 bit CPU?
Go ask you friend who is a hardware engineer which is better a single core 3.2 GHz or dual core 1.6 GHz processor? If he is smart he will say the the single core one even tough the dual core one is effectively 1.6*2=3.2 because a considerable delay is caused because of needing to synchronize two processors. Don't agree? Try asking two people to work together on one person's job. If you enable Hyper-threading on the single core and change the two core configuration to 1.8 GHz and ask him what is better, I bet you he will scratch his head and say depends. A usefulness of a multi core configuration is dependent on the way you use you computer. So get a lot more cores (4-8) if you do the following
Power consumption:
Probably one of the most important spec that is mostly forgotten to check by people is power consumption. This is very important especially if you processor sits on a laptop. More GHz/cores implies higher power consumption and can really drain your battery quickly. So you should find the right balance between power and power consumption. So when you compare two similarly configured intel core i3 and an intel core two duo you will find that the intel core i3 has a phenomenal drop in power consumption (30W isn't at a small drop)
Cache size:
Probably the only part of the specification that follows the real higher the better moto. Read more about it here
The number of bits 32 bit vs 64 bit:
If you have not studied computer architecture this is definitely confusing for you. When you walk into buy a CPU the vendor will say that 64 bit is better than 32 bit, but you notice its costlier and you are unsure if you need it. Let us understand that by going for higher number of bits we have following advantages:
- More bits means that data can be processed in larger chunks which also means more accurately.
- More bits means our system can point to or address a larger number of locations in physical memory.
32-bit systems were once desired because they could address (point to) 4 Gigabytes (GB) of memory in one go. Some modern applications require more than 4 GB of memory to complete their tasks so 64-bit systems are now becoming more attractive because they can potentially address up to 4 billion times that many locations.
When should you actually buy a 64 bit CPU?
- You are going to buy/have a 64 bit OS (yes operating systems also come in variants)
- You are going to buy/are considering to have more than 4 GB of RAM
- You use/going to use 64 bit applications (eg: Adobe creative suite, Half Life 2)
- You are going to use virtualization and install multiple OS on top
Go ask you friend who is a hardware engineer which is better a single core 3.2 GHz or dual core 1.6 GHz processor? If he is smart he will say the the single core one even tough the dual core one is effectively 1.6*2=3.2 because a considerable delay is caused because of needing to synchronize two processors. Don't agree? Try asking two people to work together on one person's job. If you enable Hyper-threading on the single core and change the two core configuration to 1.8 GHz and ask him what is better, I bet you he will scratch his head and say depends. A usefulness of a multi core configuration is dependent on the way you use you computer. So get a lot more cores (4-8) if you do the following
- Watch a movie or play a game while there is some background work like video encoding going on on you machine
- You are hosting multiple web/ftp/db servers on your machine that continuously take a lot of requests
Power consumption:
Probably one of the most important spec that is mostly forgotten to check by people is power consumption. This is very important especially if you processor sits on a laptop. More GHz/cores implies higher power consumption and can really drain your battery quickly. So you should find the right balance between power and power consumption. So when you compare two similarly configured intel core i3 and an intel core two duo you will find that the intel core i3 has a phenomenal drop in power consumption (30W isn't at a small drop)
Cache size:
Probably the only part of the specification that follows the real higher the better moto. Read more about it here
