Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The clock rate of a CPU is normally determined by the frequency of an oscillator crystal. Typically a crystal oscillator produces a fixed sine wave —the frequency reference signal. Electronic circuitry translates that into a square wave at the same frequency for digital electronics applications (or, when using a CPU multiplier , some fixed ...
Processor / System Dhrystone MIPS or MIPS, and frequency D instructions per clock cycle D instructions per clock cycle per core Year Source LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System (257-processor) 642.5 MIPS at 10 MHz: 2.5: 0.25: 1982 [98] Sega System 16 (4-processor) 16.33 MIPS at 10 MHz: 4.083: 1.020: 1985 [99] Namco System 21 (10-processor) 73.927 ...
The number of instructions per second is an approximate indicator of the likely performance of the processor. The number of instructions executed per clock is not a constant for a given processor; it depends on how the particular software being run interacts with the processor, and indeed the entire machine, particularly the memory hierarchy.
In PCs, the CPU's external address and data buses connect the CPU to the rest of the system via the "northbridge". Nearly every desktop CPU produced since the introduction of the 486DX2 in 1992 has employed a clock multiplier to run its internal logic at a higher frequency than its external bus, but still remain synchronous with it. This ...
System designers building parallel computers, such as Google's hardware, pick CPUs based on their speed per watt of power, because the cost of powering the CPU outweighs the cost of the CPU itself. [7] For spaceflight computers, the processing speed per watt ratio is a more useful performance criterion than raw processing speed due to limited ...
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time that a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer program or operating system. CPU time is measured in clock ticks or seconds. Sometimes it is useful to convert CPU time into a percentage of the CPU capacity, giving the CPU usage.
In computer architecture, frequency scaling (also known as frequency ramping) is the technique of increasing a processor's frequency so as to enhance the performance of the system containing the processor in question. Frequency ramping was the dominant force in commodity processor performance increases from the mid-1980s until roughly the end ...
Central processing units (CPUs) are the primary processors in most computers. They are designed to handle a wide variety of general computing tasks rather than only a few domain-specific tasks. If based on the von Neumann architecture, they contain at least a control unit (CU), an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), and processor registers.