sábado, 6 de octubre de 2007

Never believe numbers

Ok, i have always seen people claiming a processor was better than other one because its frequency was higher or because it had a greater cache. It tends to happen with video cards even more, we tend to think a video card having 512MB should be better than one having 320MB, and that is more likely to be false. Whenever you want to compare things (processors, memory, hard drives, video cards, whatever) don't do it the classic way, you have to see what's the actual performance. Comparing processors point to point is something really unuseful, it may lead to confusion. For example, you have a Dual Core and a Core 2 Duo. The dual Core has a frequency of 3.4Ghz and 4MB cache. The Core 2 Duo has a frequency of 2.0Ghz and a cache of 2MB. Then, which is better?? You would say the Dual Core, but if so, you are wrong. It's the Core 2 Duo. And you say "Why??". The frequency just tells you at which speed the processor works, it's like saying german people say more things in less time because they pronounce more letters per second, but then you can say "Well, that's true, but words are much longer". The same thing happens with computers. A processor might work at very high speeds but it might take more clocks to process something. That's why AMD processors have the same performance at lower frequencies, because they are designed differently and can do tasks with lower frequencies. Instead, Intel supports the idea of high clocking multipliers, requiring processors to work at much higher frequencies in order to achieve the same performance. Something like that happens with video cards. So be aware.

1 comentario:

lety dijo...

pase y colabore salu2