AMD to demonstrate dual-core chips

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Actually, it is.

Hertz (Hz) is a measure of clock cycles per second. The speed at which the CPU can run a clock cycle. On any given chip technology, any particular part of a chip or component parts of a chip (depending on design) can only complete a finite number of instructions per cycle. Therefore, the more cycles per second, the more instructions per second, the faster the chip.

However, since different chip technologies can do different finite number of instructions per clock cycle (for any given component part of said chip), true chip speed is often measured in FLoating-point Operations Per Second or FLOPS. Even this, although more accurate, is not necessarily indicative of how fast that chip will perform for you especially if your application does not use floating point calculations.

Nevertheless, flops is one of the best measurements of CPU 'speed' and MHZ is directly proportional to flops for any given chip technology.

Front-Side Bus (FSB) is the measure of cycles per second (Hz, again) of the Input/Output (I/O) databus and, agan directly related to how fast a CPU can get data to/from the processor to I/O devices such as HDD, serial devices, Parallel printers, USB devices, etc., the speed of these external interfaces not withstanding. On the Intel platform this is true for the I/O Southbridge and the Video/Memory/Processor/control bus of the Northbridge.

On AMD Athlon and better CPU's, this speed limitation is only for the Southbridge which is often limited by the devices itself moreso than the databus.

Posted by: The King's Servant   Posted on: 09/08/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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