4 ms·
Clock speed is irrelevant as a comparison point between highly out of order micro-architectures with execution ports approaching dozen by now.
by SSLy 2y ago
Clock speed is irrelevant as a comparison point between highly out of order micro-architectures with execution ports approaching dozen by now.
- mort96 2y agoCome on. We're not comparing 2.1GHz and 2.4GHz here. We're comparing 66MHz and 3500MHz. That difference is significant regardless of execution ports and other micro-architectural details. I'm not saying that the Core 2 Quad is 50x more powerful because it has 50x the Hz, or that the Core 2 Quad is 200x more powerful because it has 4x the cores @ 50x the Hz, or that it's 1024x more powerful because it has 1024x the cache, or anything like that. I'm trying to illustrate the extreme evolution of the microprocessor from the early 90s to the late '00s.
- adrian_b 2y agoFor the throughput of a computer the clock frequency is at least as important as the number of cores, the IPC (instructions per clock cycle) and the amount of work done by one instruction. Were it not for the fact that increasing the clock frequency increases the power consumption more than the throughput, clock frequency would have been the most important factor, because increasing any of the other factors increases the throughput by less than their increment, due to various inefficiencies or because not all applications can benefit from those improvements. For the computer user only the total throughput matters, not how it is achieved.