Skip to main content

Driving factors for performance design

Short answer

Demanding desktop applications (multimedia, 3D), high-throughput server workloads, and large-scale scientific computing require high speed. The growing gap between processor and memory/I/O speeds, along with heat and power limits on clock rates, forces the use of pipelining, multiple cores, caches, and parallelism.

What are the driving factors behind the need to design for performance?

Computer speed and capacity are growing fast, but software also needs more power. The main factors that force us to design for performance are:

  1. Desktop applications: image processing, 3-D rendering, speech recognition, video conferencing and multimedia need very high processing speed.
  2. Server demand: transaction processing, databases and large numbers of users need high throughput.
  3. Scientific and engineering work: simulation, weather forecasting and modelling need huge computation.
  4. Growth in data: large data volumes need fast storage and I/O.
  5. Mismatch of speeds: processor speed has risen faster than memory and I/O speed, so organization must be designed to balance them.
  6. Technology limits: clock speed is limited by heat and power, so designers use pipelining, multiple cores, caches and parallelism to gain performance.
  7. Cost and power: mobile and embedded systems need good performance per watt.

✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)

Related questions

All Computer Organization and Architecture chapter 1 questions →