Journey though Your PC - the CPU

Today we get a little bit technical, hoping to shed some light on the often confusing computer specs you may see when shopping for a new system. Today, the CPU.

The CPU is the engine of any computer.  The latest Intel CPUs come in three main types - Core i3, i5 and i7.  These are dual or quad core CPUs which means they have more than one processing core on them so are faster.  Each of these three types also has several levels, such as i5-680 3.60Ghz which reflects the “clock speed” each of the cores on the CPU runs at.  Basically, the higher the numbers the faster the CPU.   Every CPU also has another feature called the Cache.  This is an amount of memory that the CPU has built in to help it along.  Where it can get confusing is that quite often a CPU with a lower clock speed than another CPU may actually be faster as it might have more Cache memory. 

When we come to laptops, these also come in core i3, i5 and i7 flavours however the devil is in the detail.  CPUs for laptops are different to PCs due to the cooling and power requirements.  So you’ll find the c lock speeds in laptop CPUs are generally lower than in PCs or come at a much higher price.  Not to be left out, AMD also make their own range of multi-core CPUs called Athlon and Phenom range.  The same rules on clock speed and cache memory apply there also.