Can Someone explain CPU speed?

[triggrhappy94]

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I've been looking around Newegg. Can someone explain CPU speed, what the number of GHz mean, and what's consider high and low end?

This is going to be primirally for gaming

 

[Baneat]

The best metric for CPU speed is the number of Floating-Point Operations it does in a second

Clock speed means even less than it used to before for home-PCs

 

[smartengine]

It really depends on the manufacturer, the series and the model of the CPU, but generally more GHz is better, but a newer series with the same or lower number of GHz can be better (usually is)

You need to tell us what kind of a budget are you working with, and we'd be happy to help you choose the best thing for your money.

Anyway I would advise you to consider the DELL XPS series. People tend to dislike DELL, but the XPS series has been well received, and from what I can see it offers a great combination of price and performance. I myself will probably be getting an XPS 15".

 

[NicolasKnight]

A processor does math. It takes two numbers of a finished length: 32 bit, 64 bit etc, and adds them up, multiply etc...
The GHZ means how many operations it can do per second.
The number of cores essentially means that if your Motherboard is tweaked to do it it sends multiple operations to each core and they're all done at the same time. (Threading)
There is a difference between AMD and Intel in how they handle the numbers, crunch the, and how they share this with everything else on the MOBO.
Now a days the bottle neck is no longer at the processor.
It's at the GPU and the HD.
Don't worry about CPU.