Hello, everyone! I’ve been doing some research into computer hardware lately, and one thing that I keep coming across is this idea that the speed of a processor, while important, isn’t the only thing that affects a computer’s overall performance. I’m having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this because I always thought that a faster processor meant a faster computer. Can anyone explain why this isn’t necessarily the case? I’m really interested to learn more about this!
In: 97
There’s always a bottleneck and usually the bottleneck had to do with processor speed. But not always.
There was a period of time where a dirt cheap Celeron 300A could be overclocked and would outperform a Pentium II at twice the price because the Celeron had a tiny onboard cache and the PII had a large cache that was stored off-board in two banks on either side of the chip.
That little bit of speed-of-light latency that was created by having to carry data to and from points an inch away slowed the Pentium II enough for it to lose in testing. But the only way to get the Celeron up to that speed was to overclock it from 300 MHz to 450 MHz, so processor speed still counted for everything.
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