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Which CPU Do You Need
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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