Two laptops, one price gap
Two laptops sit side by side in a shop. One costs 400 pounds. The other costs 900. The label on the dear one says "8 cores, 4.5 GHz". What does that buy you? You will explain it to a customer by the end of this lesson.
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 |
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.
Starter
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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 jobs, such as a server with many users. One big job that cannot be split gains little.
Worked example: jobs and cores
| Cores | Jobs | Seconds for each job | Rounds | Total seconds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8 | 3 | 8 | 24 |
| 2 | 8 | 3 | 4 | 12 |
| 4 | 8 | 3 | 2 | 6 |
| 8 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
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.