highlogic said:
are their other factors involved for how fast a cpu run's? thanx
how fast a CPU is involves more factors than just it's clock speed alone.
OEM PC's are marketed with the processor clock speed being the only thing that matters, so this is unfortunetly what most people consider to be the only thing that matters when it comes to performance... until a little more research is done on their part.
In terms of processors, there are 4 major factors which determine it's performance. these include:
1. clock speed
2. BUS speed
3. L2 cache size and speed
4. IPC (instructions per clock)
AMD Athlon64s and AthlonXPs have a higher IPC than Pentium4's, which means they can do more work per clock cycle than pentium4s, which is why they perform as well as P4s without the high clock speed.
Intel processors duplicate the L1 data onto the L2 cache, AMDs do not... which is why they do not have to have as big of an L2 cache as well.
BUS speed is pretty standard at 200MHz for modern Intel and AMD systems, they each have different "effective" speeds for different reasons. Intels effective BUS speed via "quad pumping data" results in an 800MHz FSB. AMD64s effective speed via "direct connection to memory" results in a 2000MHz hypertransport BUS (or 1600MHz for the socket754 lineup)
the CPU clock speed is determined by the CPU multiplier x the system BUS speed. for example your CPU's 1.8GHz clock speed is the result of a 200MHz system BUS with a CPU multiplier of 9.
I hope this helped explain it a little better