CPU hypothesis..

[joe360]

All these figures are hypothetical:

Windows XP takes 500mhz or (500 work cycles) to load in 30 seconds.

So theoritically can't a P3 at 700mhz and an AMD64 3000+ load windows XP in the same time? The only difference that the AMD can play games like Far Cry and the old P3 wouldn't be able to.

The reason why I think this this is true, because I recently upgraded from a P3 700mhz to an AMD 3000+, and I found the boot times very similar.

Does this hypothesis make any sense?

 

[Jeff7181]

Not really... there's other factors such as the hard drive and memory that effect it too. Switching from a 7200 RPM drive to my 10,000 RPM Raptor made a pretty noticeable difference in the time it took Windows XP to boot for me.

*EDIT* Also, why would a 700 MHz P3 and a 1800 or 2000 MHz A64 do it in the same time?

 

[SunSamurai]

boot time has nothing to do with your cpu. its your hard drive, your theory makes no sense

 

[joe360]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Not really... there's other factors such as the hard drive and memory that effect it too. Switching from a 7200 RPM drive to my 10,000 RPM Raptor made a pretty noticeable difference in the time it took Windows XP to boot for me.

*EDIT* Also, why would a 700 MHz P3 and a 1800 or 2000 MHz A64 do it in the same time?

Okay well now I know it has nothing to do with the cpu, but I was thinking that if a task takes a certain amount of work cycles (for example 100), wouldn't not make a difference whether a 500mhz computer or 3.0 Ghz, wouldn't it still get the 100 work cycles done in the same time?

 

[ggjb]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
boot time has nothing to do with your cpu. its your hard drive, your theory makes no sense

okay, so remove your cpu and see if it boots.

Your CPU is still needed. Without one, you would have no way of processing data, and hence no OS would ever function. A faster CPU does help with boot times, but only minimally. The faster your hard drive and memory the faster it should boot.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: joe360

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Not really... there's other factors such as the hard drive and memory that effect it too. Switching from a 7200 RPM drive to my 10,000 RPM Raptor made a pretty noticeable difference in the time it took Windows XP to boot for me.

*EDIT* Also, why would a 700 MHz P3 and a 1800 or 2000 MHz A64 do it in the same time?

Okay well now I know it has nothing to do with the cpu, but I was thinking that if a task takes a certain amount of work cycles (for example 100), wouldn't not make a difference whether a 500mhz computer or 3.0 Ghz, wouldn't it still get the 100 work cycles done in the same time?

No, because 1 Hz = 1 cycle per second... 1 MHz = 1 million cycles per second, so the P3 is able to do 700 million cycles per second, and the A64 would do either 1.8 billion or 2.0 billion cycles per second. So a task that takes the P3 at 700 MHz say... 3 seconds to complete would only take the A64 about 1 second. Of course there's more to it than that with architectural differences and whatnot, but that should clarify things for you.

 

[SunSamurai]

Originally posted by: ggjb

Originally posted by: aeternitas
boot time has nothing to do with your cpu. its your hard drive, your theory makes no sense

okay, so remove your cpu and see if it boots.

Your CPU is still needed. Without one, you would have no way of processing data, and hence no OS would ever function. A faster CPU does help with boot times, but only minimally. The faster your hard drive and memory the faster it should boot.

I didnt say it was not needed, nitwit.

 

[Geomagick]

The way I see this is that for fairly mundane things like loading an OS you don't need a great deal of CPU power because the bottleneck is elsewhere, you could certainly say that a P3 700 was adequate for basic windows and application use.

The driving force behind CPU power in the home PC is pictures, videos and games.

 

[Megamixman]

Basically what you are saying is that it takes a 500mhz for 30 seconds, which means 500 million * 30 clock cyclyes. That equals 15 billion clock cycles. For a 2Ghz Athlon 64 that equals approx. 7.5 seconds, but for a 700mhz P3 thats approx. 21.4 seconds. That is of course assuming that the cpu is the only bottleneck;that you have no optimizations; and that both proccessors can compute an equal number of ops per cycle.