2006-06-23 10:37:33 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
The number you quoted is the clock rate that is used by the CPU. That is, a signal is oscillating at 1,600,000,000 times a second from a low voltage to a high voltage and back to low again.
Using an analogy to car engines, it is like how fast a car engine can rev. The revolutions per second is not the same as the horse power (which would be equivalent to the computing power).
The actual calculations per second the processor can do is normally measured as instructions per second. There are multiple factors that affect performance - how many execution units (eg. cylinders), if there are any stalls like cache misses(eg. all cylinders firing at the same time), the clock frequency (how fast the engine is rev'ing).
2006-06-23 19:15:29 · answer #1 · answered by A4Q 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The number is pretty meaningless.
1600 MHz =
1,600,000,000 (1.6 billion clock cycles a second).
All that is going on is some part of the CPU is switching that fast.
But clock cycles are not a measure of calculation speed or processor cycles unless you are comparing two identical processors (differing only in speed, so any Athlon to any other Athlon). Some processors differ in how many instructions they can execute at the same time, and some do it more efficiently than others.
Speed is affected by amount of on-chip cache, the speed of memory and the memory bus on your motherboard, and a few other things (some of which you can muck with in the BIOS).
Marketing people want numbers though.
2006-06-23 14:32:07 · answer #2 · answered by sheeple_rancher 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
1600 Mhz means the processor is able to do 1,600,000,000 instructions a second. (M is million, k is thousand) Instructions are things such as math with two numbers, or other things like sorting numbers which takes multiple instructions.
2006-06-23 11:34:10 · answer #3 · answered by geozop 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
technically, the other answers are right, (1,600,000,000 calculations a second ) but that is using the metric standard of conversion IE. 1MHz=1000kHz when really the conversion is 1MHz=1024kHz, so really, your processor can do 1,677,721,600 calculations per second, but really all it means is that that is the clock setting (ever hear of over clocking, it is just changing the clock speed)
2006-06-23 12:52:35 · answer #4 · answered by the_macgeek 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
1600 MHz is the number of executions that ur cpu can do per seond but its not 1600 executions per seond its 1,600,000 executions per second1600MHz is also 1.6 GHz every GHz is one billion executions pers second
2006-06-23 10:43:52 · answer #5 · answered by kickenchicken360 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
yes they are right, but i put it in lay man words 1600mhz or 1.6ghz means the speed of your cpu the higher it is the better or faster it will respond to your application, to enjoy that speed you must have a good video card and a sufficient memory and free space in hard drive to enjoy the pc games today in the market
2006-06-23 12:10:59 · answer #6 · answered by lepactodeloupes 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋