Capesaber Mythbusters#1: Processor vs. Clock Speed

One of the biggest marketing gimmicks of a phone today revolves around processors. Even I am forced to turn a glance when the new device offers more cores than my PC has, or, has a clock speed which makes a laptop shy. But the question that plagued me was, how much does it really matter? And if I am forced to choose between the two, which one should I go for? Upon some research and tinkering, this is what I found out.

What is a core?

Every operation that your device performs can be visualized at the machine level as a series of logical operations, consisting of zeroes and ones. A core is the unit of logical functionality, which many transistors, which can perform those operations. A dual core would mean that there are two such units and so on. 

What is clock speed? 

The clock speed is basically a measure of how fast instructions can be carried out in terms of cycles per second. All CPUs have an internal clock which regulates the functioning of the system based on this. Simply put, a CPU with higher clock speed will be able to perform more instructions per second, resulting in faster operations. 

The comparison: 

Coming back to the question, which one do you need more. As you might have anticipated, there is no definite answer. The thing is, it depends on the type of operation you are performing, and more specifically, on the app. 

The number of cores that an app can use is dependent on how the app is coded. Which means, your fancy multi-core device is of no use if the app you use cannot use them. On the other hand, if it can, then the operations get divided between the cores.

Let's take an analogy: Suppose you have to transport water from one place to another. A two liter container can transport it twice as fast as a one liter container. But suppose you have 2 one liter containers, then they will give the same speed.

Similarly, the speed and number of cores go hand in hand. More cores means the speed of all cores gets added in your operation, while higher individual speed would work better for single core operations.

NOTE: All comparisons made here are idealized: meaning, two processors with same speed are assumed to be equally capable and so are 2 devices with same number of cores. This is not entirely true, since a lot of other factors are also to be considered, such as CPU architecture, threading, actual number of operations per cycle, etc. But, the comparison does give us the general idea.