The SoC is the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) You should add a heat sink to your SoC. Pi 4 have Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling ( DVFS ) which allows SoC components to run at lower voltages and reduces clock speed when not needed. The memory is split between the GPU and CPU and you can identify how much each is allocated with the following command. vcgencmd get_mem arm && vcgencmd get_mem gpu The Top command gives general information on system performance (CPU and memory) top CPU The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the "brain" of the computer. It "fetches", "decodes" and "executes" code with each step being performed at a rate determined by the clock. A multicore architecture allows parallel processes to occur. If you want to do a dive into how computers work you should check out the PBS Crash Course on Computer Science with Video 8 being on the CPU Different versions of the Pi use different CPUs, which can be found on the Raspberry Pi Processors page of the Pi Documentation. the Pi 3 uses a BCM2837B0 and information can be found here . 64 bit Quad Core Broadcom BCM2711 (Pi 4) 1.8 GHz (clock speed) BCM2711 ARM Peripherals Documentation section 5.3 has alternative GPIO pin assignments SRM Cortex-A72 Cores Architecture handles "out of order" execution prioritizes performance over efficiency. one of the reasons the Pi 4 gets hotter than a pi 3 Caches 32 KB data and 48 KB Instruction L1 per core, 1 MB L2 shared cache Some CPU commands To get Information on your CPU cat /proc/cpuinfo To get CPU temperature vcgencmd measure_temp To find the clock speed your Pi configuration is limited to vcgencmd get_config arm_freq to find current clock speed cat /sys/devices/system//cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq GPU 32 bit Broadcom VideoCore 6 500 mHz supports Open GL ES 3 Runs 4K video decoder at 60 frames/sec