The two main measures for CPU performance are CPU clock speed and core count.
CPU clock speed is a measure of how fast a single core operates.
CPU speed is measured in gigahertz which means billions of cycles per second.
This is especially true for single-threaded tasks that cant be parallelized to support multiple threads.
A multi-threaded program can take advantage of multiple CPU cores.
Core count
Multiple CPU cores can only be taken advantage of by code designed to support multi-threading.
Multiple cores require more complicated CPU structures to be able to reliably share memory between cores.
Increasing the core count also increases the required size of the CPU which can push up the cost.
If your workload is balanced, however, its recommended that you get a balanced CPU too.
