I'm pretty sure almost all of you heard about the XBox One and the PS4, the new next-gen consoles. A lot of people are confused to why the CPU clock speeds are slower in this gen of consoles than last gen. I'll explain in this blog how clock speeds don't impact the next-gen at all.

What is a CPU?

Well CPU stands for Central Processing Unit and it's the brain of your computer. This does all the algorithm and calculations. There are single core, dual core, quad core, and eight core CPUs. The more cores you have means the more things you can do at a time. You might be thinking that you can multitask on a computer and it'll be more than 2 things at a time, well that's not really how it works. The average clock speed nowadays are between 2.5GHz - 4Ghz. What that means is if you have a CPU that is 2.5GHz then it does 2.5 Billion cycles/second, That's a lot! GHz stands for gigahertz. With all this in mind lets see why wouldn't a higher clock speed be better.

Why doesn't clock speeds matter?

The reason why a higher clock speed isn't going to make the next-gen consoles slower than the last gen is because of this one factor. Each generation of CPUs get either more efficient and/or get a different architectures. A architecture is basically how the CPU is set up. Here's a picture of how one looks like.

A new architecture means that it can do more things at a time at this is where the efficient comes in. The more things you can do at once then you can have a slower clock speed and still be able to process a lot of things.

The reason why the clock speeds are slower.

The reason why they are slower this gen is because they want to reduce the heat of their system and not having to add more fans to cool it off. This also means that the console can be smaller and not make as much noise when gaming for a long time. If you have ever used a phone and started to play a really graphically intense game you will tell how fast it can get hot.

In Conclusion

The XBox One and the PS4 will be 10x faster than the 360 and PS3 and they will be able to do a lot more in terms of raw power and graphically. Hopefully I cleared up to you guys if you were confused about how this all works.