Factors Affecting CPU Performance

Watch and follow the YouTube video, the lesson contains three parts:

Key Information and content - all you need to do here is watch and listen. We recommend you take some notes for this one!
Learning activity - You are to complete the true or false activity.
Consolidation - these are past exam question and are for deliberate practice to check your understanding.

Factors Affecting CPU Performance Full Lesson Video.mp4

Task - TRUE / FALSE Activity

Factors affecting CPU performance activity

Exam Questions - Web

1 mark per bullet to max 2

Dual core is 2 processors / cores // double the number of processors / cores
Parallel processing can take place
...which means each processor can execute a separate instruction at the same time // each processor can run a different part of the program at the same time // each core can process instructions independently of each other
...which enables multitasking
Some processes / software cannot be split between two processors so it does not increase the performance.

Do not allow 'cores can split the tasks' - need to be hoe i.e. one task for each core to run at the same time

BOD run more than one program at once.

Do not award more instructions per second - this could be achieved by having a faster clock speed.

1 mark per bullet to max 2

Cache stores frequently / recently / next to be used instructions / data
...that can be accessed faster than accessing them from RAM
...which means more cache improves the performance of the CPU // less cache decreases the performance of the CPU
Too much cache can be detrimental...
...as it will take longer to find the instructions in cache

No mark for just defining cache as being fast memory or close to the CPU

BOD - more cache makes the processing faster

BOD - more cache makes the computer run faster

The higher the clock speed the faster the CPU will run
Represents the number of fetch execute cycles / instructions the CPU can process in a given time