|
|
 |
Clock Speed
Clock speed refers to the number of work steps per second.
Thus, a PC's speed substantially depends on the processor clock. With INTEL's 486DX2 came the distinction between internal and external clock rate.
The internal clock rate, also known as the CPU cycle, indicates the speed with which the CPU processes commands internally: The higher the MHz value, the faster the respective CPU. The external clock rate, also known as "system clock" or "front side bus" (FSB), determines the speed with which the processor accesses working memory (as well as the second-level cache, if applicable). The motherboard determines the system clock rate.
For a long time the clock speed was used to measure a processor's performance. With the introduction of QuantiSpeed technology, AMD managed to significantly improve the efficiency of AMD Ahtlon XP processors by increasing the work steps per clock cycle, although the clock speed remained the same! Real performance can no longer be measured by the clock speed, but is rather more the combination of work steps per clock cycle multiplied by the clock speed. This is why AMD added model numbers to the Athlon XP and Athlon MP processors, to help the end user establish the all-important processor performance. Comprehensive tests, using 15 industry standard benchmarks and 30 application programs, have shown that the Athlon XP 2000+ is far superior to the Pentium 4 with 2.0 GHz in many areas, even though it only has a clock speed of 1.67 GHz. AMD has thus proven that clock speed alone is no longer a reliable indication of performance.
Back
|
 |
|
