Do The Differences In CPUs Really Matter?
Ryan Larson
CPU manufacturing is one of the most competitive areas of
computer world. In the end, the overall performance of your
laptop or your desktop depends on your central processing unit.
Parallel to the demands of the users, we can say that CPUs
traveled a long way from 386s to P4s and AMDs.
The cache is generally the most decisive factor in the tradeoff
equation between the price and performance. Considering the L2
cache on some of the chips, you can easily understand that
Athlon, P4 and PIII, having 256K or more L2 cache are the once
with higher performance, in other words power chips.
Looking at the budget chips, you immediately notice that
Celeron has 128K and the Duron only has 64K. Celeron is
actually almost like a PIII with half the cache disabled. These
numbers shows that the main budget issue for CPU manufacturers
is to put enough cash on the chip.
You should consider the difference between the bus speeds: in
the case of Athlon and P4, the bus speed between the Cache and
the CPU can be 200 or 400 MHz respectively. This can give your
system a major boost when you are using cache intensive
utilities. The new CPUs are coming out with quad speed pushes
and base 200MHz which results with 800MHz FSB like the new P4.
The numbers you would see under the name “Micron” in a CPU
comparison table is basically the size of the transistors. As
the number get smaller, the manufacturers can put more and more
on the CPU die. The smaller transistors you have on your CPU,
the smaller the CPU die becomes. The smaller the CPU die, less
power is required and less heat is produced.
The CPU instruction set is the total code which tells your CPU
how to process its data. The more sets you have on your CPU,
the more efficient it is most likely to be. However, on this
point Intel (Pentium) and AMD does not follow the same path.
Intel made the first attempt to improve the basic instruction
set by adding the MMX support for multimedia.
The difference's between the CPU's are getting smaller as each
company sees the advantages of their rivals technology and
tries to either use or emulate it. It is really hard to choose
which one is better. So a good advice would be let your wallet
decide which CPU your system will use.
About The Author: This article provided courtesy of
http://www.wifi-tech-guide.com
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