I’m not sure who told you that an installation on a USB thumb drive should boot “almost instantly” - that’s a much slower device than a proper HDD or SSD, and it’s normal for booting off of those to at least take a bit of time. The slow boot and the slow performance when running are probably both the same thing - slow disk I/O. A fast CPU helps run computations quickly, but installing and launching programs involves a lot of writing and reading files, which doesn’t have much to do with CPU speed.
I’m not sure who told you that an installation on a USB thumb drive should boot “almost instantly” - that’s a much slower device than a proper HDD or SSD, and it’s normal for booting off of those to at least take a bit of time. The slow boot and the slow performance when running are probably both the same thing - slow disk I/O. A fast CPU helps run computations quickly, but installing and launching programs involves a lot of writing and reading files, which doesn’t have much to do with CPU speed.