For starters you've got hyperthreading on some Intel chips but no AMD ones. Then you've got RAM speeds. Then 2nd and 3rd level cache sizes and speeds. Also there's whether or not the software can take advantage of multiple threads. When you have a performance monitor and watch some tasks, you'll see CPU utilization peak at a fraction of 100% even when there's little or no hard drive activity. Speaking of which, you have to consider that hard drives operate in milliseconds whereas the CPU and RAM operate in nanoseconds. That's a difference of a factor of a million, so if you have an I/O bound application running, it's going to slow way down. One good indicator is the Windows Experience Index which shows CPU, memory, graphics, and disk performance ratings. There's also the Windows Resource Monitor which gives a dynamic second by second graph of some of these things including network activity, another possible gating factor.
Any way you slice it though, the marketers are always going to look for ways to hype their products whether we like it or not.
Hey people, I would like some experienced opinions on processors speeds.
There is a lot of eBay and amazon shops advertising dual core processors by adding the core speeds together i.e. 2x2hz means the processors speed is 4ghz.
Is this completely misleading?
As firstly the processor will not reach that speed, secondly no manufacturers spec that speed and thirdly you wouldn't advertise a 3.5ghz quad as a 14ghz processor!
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Windows-7-Dell-Latitude-D630-Laptop-4-0Ghz-2Gb-Ram-80GB-Cheap-6-Months-Warranty/230980829801?rt=nc
http://www.ebay.com/itm/251701883975

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