Computer clock speeds

In computer terminology, speed has two chief varieties clock speed and bandwidth. Clock speeds, which give an indication of how fast a processor runs, have units of Hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. In this case, standard prefix meanings are used, so one megaHertz is 10 cycles per second. The simplest computer instructions require one dock cycle to be executed, so a processor with a clock speed of one megaHertz would be able to execute one instruction in one microsecond, and a gigaHertz processor could execute one instruc-... 

Processor lype Year Clock Speed, Mllz Bils/Word Computer Price, ... 

Let us look at names of computers 200 MHz tells us the clock speed of the computer 32 MB RAM says something about the random access memory 4 GB describes the size of the hard disk. Visio, Presario and others are smart marketing names that do not tell us anything about the characteristics of the product. The situation is similar for HPLC stationary phases. What do the manufacturers tell us in a name of their product ... 

Heterogeneity in a parallel computer can sometimes lead to reduced performance, incorrect results, or deadlock. Consider, for example, a parallel computer in which all nodes are identical, except for one node, which has a processor with a clock speed that is only half that of the processors on the other nodes. If a program running on this parallel computer distributes the computation by assigning the same amount of work to each node, the slower node will require twice as much time as the other nodes to complete its work. Hence, the overall time to complete the application will be twice as long as if all nodes had the same, faster, clock speed approximately half of the computing power of the entire parallel machine could thus be lost due to the one slow node. 

Potentially lower power consumption. Regular parallel architectures permit trading off clock speed and parallel computation in a much more flexible way than irregular ones. This issue is important when power consumption is to be minimized. 

Zilog in July 1976 introduced the Z-80, which was intended to be an improved 8080. It also used 8-b data and 16-b address, could execute all of the opcodes of the 8080 and added 80 more instructions. The register set was doubled and consisted of two banks, which could be switched. Two index registers (IX and lY) allowed for more complex memory instructions. Probably the most successful feature of the Z-80 was its memory interface. Until its introduction, dynamic random-access memory (RAM) had to be refreshed with rather complex external circuitry, which made small computing systems more complex and expensive. The Z-80 was the first chip to incorporate this refreshing capability on-chip, which increased its popularity among system developers. The Z-8 was an embedded processor similar to the Z-80 with on-chip RAM and read-only memory (ROM). It was available in clock speeds to 20 MHz and was used in a variety of small microprocessor-based control systems. 

The arithmetic logic unit, or Al,l,i, of a CPU is made up of a series of registers, or accumulators, in which the intermediate results of binary arithmetic and logic operations are accumulated. The Intel Pentium 4 processor coniains nearly 50 million transistors and is capable of operating al clock speeds greater than 5.5 GHz. The Intel tianium processor contains 22 million transistors (the Itanium 2 processor has410 million transistors I. The fastest computers can execute nearly 1 billion instructions per second. 

Exceptional developments in computing have been made in the areas of hardware, optimizing compilers, and operatings system support. It is anticipated that the cost/performance ratio for minicomputers will continue to improve substantially with additional hardware breakthroughs. Future hardware developments will implement conventional processor and memory architectures more compactly in silicon or other materials. Multiprocessors have established themselves, and significant growth will occur in the way multiple processors are used in a computer. The performance of the individual processors is expected to rapidly increase with the clock speed of announced processors exceeding 1 GHz clock speed. 

Logic, measurement, and communication must be able to be performed at high speed. Because of the exponential acceleration of quantum algorithms, a quantum computer operating at any clock speed will outperform its classical counterpart. However, given a choice between two otherwise equivalent quantum computer architectures, the faster architecture will be the most desirable. 

Virtually all tasks which require the routine application of human expertise, in an organized way, are candidates for expert systems. The computer implementation of expertise has such advantages as speed, around-the-clock availability, and ease of expansion of the knowledge base. As such, expert systems represent the next generation of higher level software, performing tasks presently done by human operators. 

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