The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the heart of any computing system including, of course, your PC/laptop. The most important differentiator between PCs is the difference in the power of their CPU. On average, the power of the CPUs increases over the years. It is interesting to note that fifty years ago George Moore anticipated that roughly every two years, the power of the CPUs will double. This is commonly referred as Moore’s law. The other side of the coin is that in parallel the applications become heavier over the years and they CPU demands keep increasing.

Every application you run on your PC is consuming a portion of your CPU. Some application have modest CPU requirements while others, mainly AI based applications, might be very demanding and consume a significant portion of your CPU (or GPU). Should this be a consideration when selecting which application to install and run? The answer is positive otherwise, you might find your CPU constantly busy trying to meet the increasing demands of very hungry applications and the consequences can be:

• Increased response time. You might find the response time for keystrokes or mouse movements getting bigger.
• Lag in on-line streaming. Streaming audio and video, for example in on-line meeting, might lag.
• Stalls. Your computer will stall or freeze from time to time.
• Increased power consumption. The increase in power consumption will noticeable especially on laptops running on batteries that will last for shorter time periods.
• Increased heat and noise. The PC/Laptop will overheat causing the fan to work much harder and louder trying to cool things down.

The same way energy efficiency is an important factor when choosing an electric appliance, like an air condition, the CPU efficiency should be an important factor when selecting the application to use. Today, comparing different applications is easy. There are few web sites that enable you to compare different alternatives to almost any software application and functionality you might need. Where to start? A good starting point is to write the words “alternative to ….” in your search engine.