The CPU is the brain of your PC,
executing the instructions of the software programs you run, such as
Windows XP, Linux, Word, and Quicken. Most PCs are referred to by their
CPU and speed, such as a "2GHz Pentium 4" or a "1.4GHz Athlon."
Currently, all CPUs being manufactured for use in PCs run at speeds
from a minimum of 500 megahertz (MHz) to more than 2 gigahertz (GHz),
where hertz (Hz) expresses the number clock cycles the CPU steps
through in one second.
If you should as, "What can a CPU do in a single step?" the answer is "It depends on the CPU." All CPUs can actually do several things at the same time, and the designers squeeze every drop of performance they can out of a clock cycle. Although it's no longer true that equivalent speed ratings for Intel and AMD CPUs express equivalent performance, the numbers are valid for comparing performance within a family of CPUs. Thus, a 2 GHz Pentium 4 can execute 33 percent more instructions/second than a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. We'll talk more about how the speed of the CPU impacts the overall performance of the PC in the next chapter.
If you should as, "What can a CPU do in a single step?" the answer is "It depends on the CPU." All CPUs can actually do several things at the same time, and the designers squeeze every drop of performance they can out of a clock cycle. Although it's no longer true that equivalent speed ratings for Intel and AMD CPUs express equivalent performance, the numbers are valid for comparing performance within a family of CPUs. Thus, a 2 GHz Pentium 4 can execute 33 percent more instructions/second than a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. We'll talk more about how the speed of the CPU impacts the overall performance of the PC in the next chapter.
Intel Pentium CPU
One of the biggest bottlenecks to CPU performance is memory speed. These huge numbers for CPU speed we are casually throwing around don't mean much of anything unless the CPU can be supplied with instructions to carry out and data to operate on. To minimize the amount of time CPUs spend waiting for memory, small amounts of super-fast memory called cache are included in the CPU package. The Athlon has the biggest cache at 384 KB, followed by the Pentium 4, the Pentium III, the Duron, and the Celeron. Depending on the type of work the CPU is doing, it might find as much as 90 percent of the data it is looking for in cache. Considering that the CPU cache is likely to amount to less than 1 percent of the total system memory, that's pretty good hit rate.
One of the biggest bottlenecks to CPU performance is memory speed. These huge numbers for CPU speed we are casually throwing around don't mean much of anything unless the CPU can be supplied with instructions to carry out and data to operate on. To minimize the amount of time CPUs spend waiting for memory, small amounts of super-fast memory called cache are included in the CPU package. The Athlon has the biggest cache at 384 KB, followed by the Pentium 4, the Pentium III, the Duron, and the Celeron. Depending on the type of work the CPU is doing, it might find as much as 90 percent of the data it is looking for in cache. Considering that the CPU cache is likely to amount to less than 1 percent of the total system memory, that's pretty good hit rate.
Informative post regarding Central processing unit. CPU is the brain of any computer system that execute the directions of the software programs that you run and also the biggest issue to a CPU performance is it's memory speed. Thanks for sharing such helpful post with us.
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