Can we know the performance of a processor only by the cores and the speed?

More and more people are interested in understanding the specifications of computers or other devices when buying a new model. Many manufacturers take advantage of giving excessively simplified information in order to confuse the user and make them buy their product. The best example is the processor, when we go to buy a new PC it is very common to tell us the number of cores and their speed in GHz or MHz, but, is it enough to know its performance?

The number of cores of a processor and its speed is not everything

When we go to buy a mobile or a computer, we immediately see that they tell us characteristics such as the processor cores and their speed, they imply that more cores and more speed means more performance, but, this is not always the case as it depends on many Other features. The cores of a processor are very complex and there are many different ones. For example, the processors that use mobile phones have almost nothing to do with those that use computers, nowadays it is not uncommon to see a mobile phone with a ten-core processor while laptop computers make up for two or four cores.

Even within the same device there can be huge differences, different cores such as Cortex A72 and Cortex A53 are used in mobiles, the former are much more powerful so two Cortex A72 cores can do much more work than more Cortex A53 cores.

We recommend reading the best processors on the market

Other factors that determine the performance of a processor are the instructions parallelization algorithms, these what they do is dictate how the instruction queues are going to be executed taking advantage of all the cores of a processor. The problem is that not all tasks can be parallelized so sometimes a very powerful core will be much better than several weaker cores. Paralleling is generally very complex and expensive, making it much easier for programmers to work with a single, very powerful kernel.

An example where a very powerful core provides a major advantage is video games. The quad- core Core i7 7700K processor is the most powerful per core and is the undisputed king in gaming. Another processor such as the eight-core Ryzen 5 1700 is slightly less powerful per core, so in games it is somewhat below the Core i7 7700K, however, in other tasks it is much more powerful.

In conclusion, we can say that, in general, a processor with more cores and at a higher speed will be more powerful than another with fewer cores and less speed, although it is not a sure thing. The more different the devices are from each other, the greater the differences between their processors, so this rule will be less exact.