Understanding Processors

Processors are the brains of your computer system and can vary greatly in price from similar speed units.  This is to better help you understand the general specs of a processor and understanding those specs that aren’t so well described.  There are two major manufacturers for consumer PC processors, those being Intel and AMD.  This will not be an article regarding superiority of one over the other but a general overview of processors and their specs as a whole.

Socket Configuration

This is important for processors since the processor must mate to the system board (motherboard) properly.  Typically a system board only has one type of socket configuration, and your processor must match that socket.  Here are a list of the common socket types for each manufacturer:

Intel Sockets	AMD Sockets
LGA 1150 LGA 1155 LGA 2011 LGA 2011-v3 LGA 775	Socket AM1 Socket AM2 Socket AM3 Socket AM3+ Socket FM2 Socket FM2+

These are not all of them, these are just the common ones in use today.  AMD and Intel sockets are not interchangable, and typical not compatible within their own brand group as well.  

Clock Speed

The clock speed is a measure of how fast a processor core can complete a task.  This is how “fast” a processor is and where the majority of the cost comes from when purchasing a processor.  Intel processors commonly run in speeds of up to 4GHz and AMD processors running up to 4.7Ghz.  So a task that takes a 2Ghz processor to complete in 1 second, and 4Ghz processor would complete the same task in a half of a second.  The higher the processor typically the better the processor.

Number of Cores

The number of cores is really how many processors are in a CPU.  A single core processor can only complete one task at a time, a dual core can operated 2 instructions and so on.  So this obviously is a more cores the better type scenario.  Common core counts on today’s processors as of this writing are 2-8 cores.  This improves the overall efficiency of your processor by being able to perform multiple tasks at once.

Hyper-Threading

This is an Intel proprietary technology that in short makes a computer think there are twice the number of cores as what there actually are in the processor.  The downside to this is software that is used must be written to take advantage of this, otherwise the system just uses the processors as normal.

L2 Cache

This is the on board memory for the processors to use while handling instructions.  This is the second fastest memory available to the processor, typically a larger L2 cache to a certain point is better for the average user because L2 cache is much faster than the memory installed on the system board.  So processors of equal speed, the processor with a faster L2 cache will perform slightly faster than a processor with lower L2 Cache size.  Also L2 cache is per core, so if an 8 Core processor has a 1MB cache that’s acutally 8MB of L2 cache, 1 for each core.  

L3 Cache

This is also on board memory for the processor to access while handling instructions this is larger although slower than the L2 cache.  This is described for all the cores on the processor to share.  Even though this is slower than the L2 cache, it is still much faster than the system memory installed on the system board.  A larger L3 cache is prefered for the general user as well.

So I hope this helps you understand why the processors can vary in price as they do even when they are the same speed, and you can understand the basics of how to marry a CPU to a system board when buying a new CPU or building your first computer.