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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.
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