For those who like to assemble their own computers, the CPU is very familiar. Without the CPU, the computer cannot run normally. What are the main technical parameters of the CPU?
1. The word length:
The word length is the number of bits the CPU can process at a time. The CPU word length is mainly determined by the number of bits in the arithmetic unit and register. For example, if a CPU has 32-bit registers and processes 32 bits at a time, we say that the CPU has a 32-bit word length and is called a "32-bit CPU." The size of the word length directly reflects the data processing capacity of the computer. The larger the word length value is, the more binary bits of data can be processed at one time, and the stronger the computing capacity is. Most popular cpus are 32-bit or 64-bit.
2. The dominant frequency:
The CPU's main frequency is the CPU's clock frequency, which is the timer that determines the speed at which instructions are executed. It is usually measured in MHz(MHz) and GHz(gigahertz). 1 MHZ equals 1 million clock cycles per second, and 1 GHZ equals 1 billion clock cycles per second.
Clock cycles are the smallest unit of CPU time. The speed at which the CPU executes each task is measured in clock cycles. It should be noted that the clock rate is not equal to the number of instructions the processor executes in 1 second. On many computers, some instructions take only one clock cycle, and some instructions require multiple clock cycles to execute. Some cpus can even execute several instructions in a single clock cycle.
For example, 3.6GHz means the CPU clock runs 3.6 billion clock cycles in 1 second. All other things being equal, a computer with a 3.6ghz processor is much faster than one with a 1.5ghz or 933 MHz processor.