CPU Speed
The speed of your CPU is actually not a reliable indicator of the CPU’s performance.
The reason is that many factors inside and outside of the CPU have a significant impact on both CPU and overall system performance.
Everything in the system affects total system performance, from the rotational speed and access time of the hard disk drive to the speed of video RAM.
Your CPU
A CPU’s speed is measure in megahertz. A 1MHz CPU can accomplish one million CPU cycles in one second.
Then a 2MHz CPU is obviously twice as fast as a 1Mhz CPU, right?
Well, maybe not. That depends on how much work the CPUs accomplish during each clock cycle.
For example, if the 1MHz CPU is more efficient or can process more tasks during each cycle it might actually be faster than the 2Mhz CPU.
The Cache
The cache enables the CPU to access recently used information very quickly and it will significantly affect CPU performance, but they also represent some difficulties in simple comparison.
A typical L1 cache is 256Kb and a typical L2 cache is 1MB. One would suppose that the larger the cache, the better the system performance boost, but this is not always the case.
Just like the CPU, the cache operates at a certain speed. While some caches operate at the full speed of the CPU, others operate at half that speed …or less.
A small cache which operates at full speed is more useful than a cache twice as large that operates at half the speed of the CPU.
Some CPU’s utilize inclusive caches. That means that the data stored in the L1 cache is often duplicated in the L2 cache and the full capacity of their L2 caches will be available.
The Front Side Bus
The connection between the CPU and system memory is the Front Side Bus (FSB).
Its operation speed is a percentage of the CPU clock speed.
The performance of the CPU will be better the faster the speed at which the Front Side Bus allows data transfer.
System Memory
If your computer has a fast RAM access speed, the CPU will wait less for data. This will make the CPU faster.
Benchmarking
Another way of measuring CPU speed and overall system performance is benchmarking.
Unfortunately, a benchmark can only prove how quickly a system runs the benchmark, but not show how quickly a system will run real world applications.
Conclusion
Truthfully, almost any new PC that you can buy today will be fast enough to run most applications reasonably well.
Read your application documentation or contact your application vendor if you think you need help running your application.
