Looking for a CPU lesson

[hat]

Download CPU-Z, check out the model, and more specifically, what socket. If you want to upgrade the CPU, you need to find a better CPU that uses the same socket type. You also gotta watch out for the motherboard's power limitations. A lot of motherboards only support up to 95w processors, and may fry if you run a higher wattage cpu in them.

 

[T4C Fantasy]

the more dense the transistors are, the greater the distance the electricity can travel in a shorter amount of time, so all those electrons bouncing around in a smaller area will create more heat while at the same time making greater speed.

 

[Aquinus]

It's simply the size of the wires. Since everything is closer together CPUs with smaller processes tend to use less voltage and consume less power. However, when overclocking smaller processes and circuit size increases the amount of leakage at higher voltages, which means a larger fraction of that energy consumption is being lost to heat. Even if IVB (a 22nm chip) lid was soldered to the CPU itself, it will always run hotter than a SB chip when voltages are increased proportionally. With all of this said, IVB is a better chip because components will be closer together so the propagation delay will be less on smaller processes. All in all, smaller is faster and uses less power, but more of that power is lost to heat if voltage didn't decrease proportionally.

Pardon my post, I'm tying to type on a phone. :|

Edit: also t4c is partially right. Smaller wires have higher impedance due to the size, so more heat gets generated. Also at really high frequencies you have to consider the skin effect where the charge carriers get pushed towards the outside of the conductor. Less area also increases leakage because the charge density will increase exponentially as power increases.