Hello

 

i am planning to get new laptop. Can someone please explain why older cpu has CPU boost up to 5ghz but the new 11th gen has only 4.6. I thought to run P3D best, you need great single core performance and best clock speed. But 11th gen intel cpus are Lower in clock speeds but faster in performance compared to 10th gen CPU’s. How does that work?

 

Cheers

 

Nikita

It all boils down to a metric called "IPC"--instructions per clock.  Modern CPUs don't just run a single instruction at a time...they pre-fetch instructions and data ahead of the current one and process at least parts of them while the current instruction is processed over a number of clock cycles by making some assumptions about the memory fetching and program branching that might occur ahead of the current instruction.  This increased IPC works well where programs and the data they access are somewhat linear and/or predictable...not so well when there's a lot of conditional branching or in-memory data thrashing going on.

That said, the benchmarks often used to declare victory on the basis of increased throughput owing to increased IPC are usually cherry-picked to take advantage of that capability.  Real-world processes will see a more mixed bag of results.