ITPEC IP October 2022 Question 10

Same architecture, higher clock, faster — each clock cycle does the same work, so more cycles per second means faster processing.

With the architecture fixed, an instruction takes the same number of clock cycles. The clock frequency is the number of cycles per second, so raising it shortens the time per instruction and increases the processing speed.

Answer (c)

Why not others:

• •(a) — reversed: a 64-bit CPU handles 64 bits at a time, twice as long as a 32-bit CPU
• •(b) — less cache means fewer hits and more accesses to slower main memory, so processing gets slower, not faster
• •(d) — reversed: a quad core has four cores and a dual core two, so the quad core runs more processes at once

Key rule: Clock frequency compares speed only between CPUs of the same architecture; across designs, the work done per cycle, the cache and the number of cores also count.

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