operations per second

[jesperth]

The AMD Athlon XP (Palomino core) can preforme 9 oprations per clock cycle, while the Intel Pentium 4 only can preform 6 operations per clock cycle. The Intel however has a 400 MHz system bus, while the AMD only has 266MHz. Does that mean that you get 6,000,000 more operations per second with the pentium 4??

/Jesper

 

[AndyHui]

It doesn't quite work like that.

What is the question that you are trying to ask exactly? The IPC of a processor is not determined by the FSB.

To quote sohcan, who has already typed this out (and thus saving me having to come up with the list myself),

IPC is determined by fetch/schedule/issue/retire rate; number and organization of functional units; pipelined instruction latency; reorder window size; number of renaming registers; in-order vs. out-of-order execution; speculative vs. non-speculative execution; pipeline length/branch mispredict penalty; clock rate; branch prediction/branch target buffer organization and accuracy; multilevel cache size, bandwidth, latency, associativity, block size, replacement algorithms, write-through/write-back characteristic; main memory latency and bandwidth; ISA characteristics: number of logical registers, number of operands; the compiler; the software;...and the kitchen sink.

 

[nemo160]

take your ipc x operating frequency (the processor's peed in mhz)
so an athlon xp 1800+(1.53 GHx operating frequency)
1,533,333,333 cycles/second x 9 ops/cycle =13,799,999,997 ops/second
p4 2GHz
2,000,000,000 cycles/second x 6 ops/cycle = 12,000,000,000 ops/second
of course, each of these figures is a best case scenario
what the fsb determines is how much fast data can be transferred to memory from the processor and from memory to the processor
BUT.....the athlon core was optimized for working with the 200/266 mhz bus, and the p4 was optimized for its 400 mhz busso a direct comparison isn't entirely accurate
but in the end..real world tests can give you a much more realistic picture of how processors compare to one another

 

[dunkster]

What nemo160 said.

Study comparative benchmarks between AMD and Intel systems for a better grasp of comparative performance.

Hope this helps!

 

[jesperth]

Thanks. What can I say - I'm a newbie...

 

[nemo160]

hey..everybody's a newbie at some point..its all good
welcome to Anandtech!
check out the cpu reviews on the front page, even if you're not specifically interested in the processor that is the focus of it, because the bennchmarks are run on a variety of cpus and nicely graphed so you can easily compare cpus, then check either the price review guides or pricewatch and get an idea of how much each comparitive processor and related system components cost relative to other setups, so you can get as much performance out of your cash as posssible