What are all the technical terms mean?

lookouthere

Senior member
May 23, 2003
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What are all the technical terms mean?
1) FSB?
2) L2 cache
3) Numbers of Instructions


Anyone know why the clock speed of one processor does not mean the performance?
 

Jeff7181

Lifer
Aug 21, 2002
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Originally posted by: lookouthere
What are all the technical terms mean?
1) FSB?
2) L2 cache
3) Numbers of Instructions


Anyone know why the clock speed of one processor does not mean the performance?

FSB = front side bus... simply put, it's the connection between the CPU and the "northbridge" on the motherboard where the memory controller is

L2 cache = level 2 cache... again, simply put, it's high speed RAM located on the CPU itself

Number of Instructions... I'm not sure where you heard that... or what it's in reference to... don't know if it's in reference to the number of instructions that there are in the SSE2 instruction set... or the number of instructions in AMD's 3DNow instruction set...

Or maybe you meant Operations per Clock Cycle, in which case, that is in reference to the amount of work the CPU can do in one clock cycle.

Or maybe you meant something about the number of stages in each CPU's pipeline? I dunno... "number of instructions" can be used to talk about any number of things.
 

bjc112

Lifer
Dec 23, 2000
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Or maybe you meant Operations per Clock Cycle, in which case, that is in reference to the amount of work the CPU can do in one clock cycle.

I think that's what he's referring to..

That is how AMD has it's rating system.. a 1700+ @ 1.4 ghz is or about as fast as a 1.7 ghz p4... The AMD CPU gets more done per instruction...

 

Jeff7181

Lifer
Aug 21, 2002
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The AthlonXP has 10 integer and 15 floating point piplines... I'm not sure how many Intel has, but I know it's more because I know Intel has significantly longer pipelines.
 

Mickey21

Senior member
Aug 24, 2002
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Originally posted by: Jeff7181
The AthlonXP has 10 integer and 15 floating point piplines... I'm not sure how many Intel has, but I know it's more because I know Intel has significantly longer pipelines.

A P4 has a 20 stage pipeline just FYI, but in technical truth it is actually 28 stages. The final 20 stages are the only ones that are part of the critical execution path. Just for reference, the PIII had 10 stages. Due to advanced branch prediction, 20 stages is considered by Intel to be the point where the benefits still outweigh the disadvantages of increasing the amount of stages involved due to impossible branch predictions. So you wouldnt just throw in a 50 stage pipeline. A balance must be maintained. So more stages isnt always better. The data must be handled properly.
 

Jeff7181

Lifer
Aug 21, 2002
18,368
11
81
Originally posted by: Mickey21
Originally posted by: Jeff7181
The AthlonXP has 10 integer and 15 floating point piplines... I'm not sure how many Intel has, but I know it's more because I know Intel has significantly longer pipelines.

A P4 has a 20 stage pipeline just FYI, but in technical truth it is actually 28 stages. The final 20 stages are the only ones that are part of the critical execution path. Just for reference, the PIII had 10 stages. Due to advanced branch prediction, 20 stages is considered by Intel to be the point where the benefits still outweigh the disadvantages of increasing the amount of stages involved due to impossible branch predictions. So you wouldnt just throw in a 50 stage pipeline. A balance must be maintained. So more stages isnt always better. The data must be handled properly.

So what are the first 8? They for branch prediction?