Agafaster wrote:
JJ wrote:
You cant even compare different genrations of the same processor family by MHZ. MHZ is the most pointless indicator of chip performace of chips thers is. Unless you are comparing chips of eexactly the same architecture. Obivously 50mhz 030 is faster than a 25mhz 030. But you cant compare it against anything else by the MHZ
Although saying that, I do recall a 'rule of thumb' that a PPC of a certain clock could perform around 2x the equivalently clocked contemporary Pentium. I guess that'd be the PIII cf. the G3 though...
No, that would be against the Pentium4 which had very long (22 stage?) pipelines, so that very high clock speeds could be achieved, at the expense of work that could be done per clock cycle. It was a strategy based on the idea that transistor switching speeds would increase dramatically in a short space of time... this did not happen and they have currently topped out at around ~3Ghz.
AMD and Motorola opted for shorter pipelines, which resulted in lower clock speeds but more work gets done per cycle... With the Core2 architecture Intel have adopted the same approach, and brought with them all the good stuff from the P4 (ie great branch predictors and macroop fusion, etc)... (and borrowed all the good ideas of the Athlon64 and the PIII too)...
