The report that takes all lunch
An analyst starts a report over twelve months of sales. It runs for forty minutes. A friend runs the same report on a newer machine. It takes ten.
The label on the new machine says "8 cores, 4.5 GHz". By the end of this lesson you will say what those words buy.
Key words
| Word | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | the processor: the part that runs program instructions | |
| Core | one working unit inside a processor | a 4-core processor |
| Clock speed | how many steps a core takes each second | 3 GHz |
| Cache | a small, very fast memory on the processor | |
| RAM | the main memory that holds work in progress | |
| Mobile processor | a processor made to use little power | |
| Query | a question you ask a store of data |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can explain how cores, clock speed and cache change how fast a processor works.
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3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
More cores do more jobs at once
A core is one working unit inside the CPU. A core does one job at a time. A CPU with four cores can work on four jobs at the same moment.
More cores help when there are many separate jobs, such as reading twelve monthly files. One big job that cannot be split gains little.
Worked example: files and cores
| Cores | Files | Seconds for each file | Rounds | Total seconds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | 5 | 12 | 60 |
| 2 | 12 | 5 | 6 | 30 |
| 4 | 12 | 5 | 3 | 15 |
| 12 | 12 | 5 | 1 | 5 |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
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3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.