CPU speed is not a good indicator of CPU performance.
Many factors inside and outside of the CPU significantly impact the CPU and overall system performance.
The CPU
CPU speed is measure in megahertz. A 1MHz CPU can accomplish one million CPU cycles in one second.
Does this mean that a 2MHz CPU is twice as fast as a 1Mhz CPU?
Not necessarily. This depends on how much work each CPU accomplishes in each clock cycle.
The 1MHz CPU might very well be faster, in practice, than the 2Mhz CPU if it is more efficient or can process more tasks in each CPU cycle.
The Cache
A cache enables the CPU to access recently used information very quickly.
A cache significantly affects CPU performance.
However, caches also represent some difficulties in simple comparison.
Some caches are bigger than others. A typical L1 cache is 256Kb and a typical L2 cache is 1MB.
Generally speaking, the larger the cache, the better the system performance boost. However, this is not always the case.
A cache operates at a certain speed, just like the CPU’s core. Some caches operate at the full speed of the CPU, while others operate at half that speed or less.
A small cache that operates at full speed may be much more useful than a cache that is twice as large but operates at only half the speed of the CPU.
Even comparing cache sizes can be difficult. Some CPUs utilize inclusive caches. In a CPU with an exclusive cache, the data stored in the L1 cache is often duplicated in the L2 cache. Only CPUs that employ exclusive caches will have the full capacity of their L2 caches available.
The Front Side Bus
The Front Side Bus (FSB) is the connection between the CPU and system memory.
The Front Side Bus operates at a speed that is a percentage of the CPU clock speed.
The faster the speed at which the Front Side Bus allows data transfer, the better the CPU performance.
System Memory
RAM has an access speed. Faster RAM means that the CPU has to wait less often for data. This effectively makes the CPU faster.
The Rest of the System
Everything in the system affects total system performance, from the rotational speed and access time of the hard disk drive to the speed of video RAM.
Benchmarking
The next possible answer for measuring CPU speed and overall system performance is benchmarking.
Unfortunately, benchmarks are necessarily flawed. A benchmark can only prove how quickly a system runs the benchmark. A benchmark cannot show how quickly a system will run a user’s mix of applications in the real world.
The Good News
The good news is that almost any new PC will be fast enough to run most applications reasonably well.
If the user believes that his/her application has special requirements, he/she should read the application documentation or contact the application vendor.
1.33 Ghz memory speed 1.25 gb with 80 gb hard drive..
how do you rate this speed for a notebook laptop
I rate that about 2/5 stars. I recently bought a laptop, and it is 2.56 GHz with 8GB memory and 500 GB hard drive. I bought this new one because my old one wasn’t good enough for me, and it had 1.6 GHz processor with 2GB memory and 160GB hard drive.
well… glad you got yourself a nice laptop logan.
Kris, that laptop is fine for ordinary tasks like email, word processing and internet browsing, but if you want to do gaming or any higher stress computing, you’re going to want more ram, and a faster processor clock speed. Also, i assume 1.25 gb of ram is a 1024 stick and a 256 stick, you might want to match the amount of ram in each stick because many motherboards support dual channel memory, which more or less effectively doubles your rams bus.