is it true the higher the processer speed the better the computer?

Answer 1

The answer is a bit complex. All other things being equal, a processor that is clocked faster will execute more instructions. The key is that phrase "all other things being equal." In the early days of the PC revolution consumers and manufactures latch on to processor speed as an important feature. with today's processors however, raw clock speed doesn't tell you much.

Today's processors take several clock "ticks" to execute a single instruction, so a processor running at 2.8 GHz that executes in 4 ticks, is really faster than a processor running at 3 GHz that takes five ticks.

Processors today have instruction pipelines to speed things up. These pipelines function like bucket brigades, so that each stage of the pipeline does one part of the work required to complete one instruction. With a well written program, you can get close to a net efficiency of executing one instruction per tick.

Pipelines however have a weakness, what do you do when the program branches, depending on the result of an instruction? The simplest way to solve the problem is to throw out all the partially executed instructions, and start loading the pipeline again. Later, manufacturers added circuitry to "predict" which path would be taken, and improve the average speed. More recently still, they've added dual pipelines and simply execute BOTH paths simultaneously, until it can be determined which is correct.

Memory (or lack thereof) has more of an impact on overall performance than processor speed. Dollar for dollar, you're better putting money into memory. The reason is, when you run low on real memory, the operating system starts swapping memory pages out to the hard drive. (This is virtual memory) The more virtual memory you use, the more time the computer spends swapping pages back and forth. In extreme cases, the machine will start to "thrash", and spends almost ALL it's cycles swapping VM.

Answer 2

not completely. Throughput depends on how much memory you have and the speed of the disks. Also the speed of the "bus" is important.
The CPU only tells you how fast the engine can spin. The bus is the transmission that gets power to make it go. If you put your car in neutral and race the engine, will it go anywhere?
a good computer has
a high speed CPU 2.4 Ghz or better
1 Gb of memory, if you really want speed get RAMBUS 1024 memory.
High speed disks, 7200 rpm with a large cache is good.
(Think of cache like a shovel to move stuff into and out of memory.)
The main bus for most computers has a 512 mhz speed or better.

Of course any computer running Linux or Solaris 10 will be much faster than any windows machine simply because the software is superior and less troublesome.

Good luck.

Answer 3

well it is true that higher the processor speed, better will be the computer. but there are other factors too that contribute to the speed of the computer, like amount of cache memory, RAM and one vital thing that should be taken care of is the front side bus speed of the processor and the RAM should be or around the same, i have seen that people have a computer that has a pentium some MHZ with 667 or 800 mhz FSB while the RAM is 533 MHZ.

Answer 4

Actually, whislt netburst was the rage, that would have been true. But not anymore.

Clock speed is having elss significance every day, for example an AMD 3200 will rival a 3ghz pentium yet the amd3200 only runs at 2ghz.

Important factors in speed are now items such as dualcore, processor cache and the amount of bits it can work with.

RAM has limited effect on a computer, if you dont have enough you will suffer, but you will only benefit from having ram you actually use. If your average useage is 700mb you will benefit from having 1gb of ram but not two.

enjoy :) a good forum for this sort of thing is tech forums, theyr kinda friendly there I find.

Answer 5

No, the processor (or CPU) is ONE of several components that determine the speed of a computer.

The major things are hard drive, RAM, bus, CPU and other things. The CPU/processor is rated in megahertz (and gigahertz now). My first computer was 4 megahertz. This meant that in one clock cycle, my CPU could process X amount of data times 4 million!

So, is that fast? Not really, because my bus back then was 8-bit. This is how much data can push through my CPU...8 bits. So the total data my CPU could process was 4 million times 8 bits every second.

Today our processors are over 2 gigahertz and the bus is not 32 bit! 2 trillion times 32 is very fast. So fast, that my hard drive can't feed the data fast enough to every max out by CPU!

So, judging JUST on CPU speed is not enough. A 1 megahertz processor on a 32-bit system will run faster than a 2 megahertz on 8-bit system bus, for example.

This is where RAM comes into play, RAM is faster memory storage than a hard drive and can feed much more data to the CPU than a hard drive. MUCH faster. So much faster that if you had a 20gigabyte hard drive many people would wish that had 20 gig's of RAM! Ok, that is a little overkill, but that system could keep a CPU busier than other. So how much RAM is enough...the answer is enough to keep your CPU busy which works out to 1 or 2 gigabytes of RAM.

In today's computer purchasing, you can't get a CPU processor slower than 1 gig if you tried. So, trust me , your CPU is fast enough no matter what you get (unless you type realy, really, really fast). However, most computers sell with way less than 2 gig or RAM I've notice. Go ahead and spend a little more to get more RAM to take advantage of whatever CPU they give you. As much as you can afford up to 2 gig (about $100 per gig).

And be aware that 64-bit systems are gaining in the market!

Remember, bus and CPU are so fast today that you don't really need to even think about them again. Concentrate on as much RAM as you can afford to spend (I recommend 1 to 4 gig) and the hard drive (size as well as speed - hey, even RAM has to save its data somewhere!).

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

The CPU (brains of the PC), RAM (area in which programs are loaded up temporarily until you turn off the power to the PC), Hard drive (permanent storage for information even if the power is turned off) and video card (specifically for games and video/picture editing and watching t.v. on the PC) are the main components in having a PC better than others.

There's also whether you wan't your PC watercooled (lowers the temperature's in the computer's components thus letting the run faster.

You always want to keep you PC updated with the latest drivers (software that communicates between the hardware installed on your PC and the OS (Windows XP,etc.)

Last but not least is the circuitry and technology to make the PC faster. For hard drives, I recommend SATA, hopefully with SATA II comeing out, data thoroughput will be 800MBps (that's when you are burning stuff to CD/DVD, it'll help burn faster as well if you are playing games.

Answer 7

Not really, depends on a lot of other things as well, the clock-speed is not even such a big factor.
A AMD on 2000 is faster than an Intel on 3000 for instance.
then there is the speed of ram and the speed of the chip-set, and since XP is swapping like hell, the HD speed is real important.
And then it also depends a lot on what system you are using.
For instance eCS runs faster on a 1000 machine than XP runs on a 2000 machine.

Answer 8

The higher the processor speed, the faster the computer as long as it has the RAM to support it.

Answer 9

Yes, that is one part of it. The higher your processor speed is, the faster your computer.
You also have to get everything new too. You will need the new video card, RAM, etc.

Answer 10

High speed is great, but there are no guarantees on longevity. You can get a "lemon" in anything. Best thing to do is to buy equipment from a reputable business with good support.