What does 'frequency' mean in regard to computer processors?

Answer 1

it means the rate at which the processor can execute primitive operations. For example a 1 GHz processor can carry out 1 billion primitive operations per second.

Answer 2

It refers to the clock speed of a processor, in general the faster the clock speed the better the processor. This is not a perfect way to judge the speed though due to different ways to calculate this, intel are movind away from using clock speed to rate processors.

A 2MHz AMD processor works out faster than a 2MHz intel (could be other way round). Processors will probably rated by FLOPs in future which is a measure of the number of operations per secon it can do.

Computer speed can also be affected by the other components in it such as memory, bus speed and hard drive etc.

Answer 3

Simply put, a computer processor has thousands of little "switches" set in circuits. A small current is sent around the circuits, going through the switches and depending on the combination of "on" and "off" positions of different switches, different computations can be done by the processor.

The frequency (often referred to as the speed) of the processor refers to how many cycles of the circuits in the processor are completed every second, for instance 1MHz implies that 1,000,000 cycles are completed per second and 1GHz would suggest 1,000,000,000 cycles.

Answer 4

Frequency is a measure of how many bites of data can be processed in a given time. 1Mb/sec would be 1 mega(million) bits of data per second. The bigger the number the faster the proc. Faster and bigger are better! (not in physical size, obviously.)

Answer 5

the front side bus is the path data takes to and from the processor to various components on the motherboard.