"educate me please."Clock speed doesn't really matter like it used to. That's why AMD switched to the XP "naming system".
An AMD 2000+XP performs right in the area of a 2.0Ghz P4. The actual clock speed is proably around 1.5Ghz like Paige said. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is because a P4 can handle 6 instructions per clock cycle while the AMD can do 9 (I think that's right).
The celeron/duron processors are slower than their big brothers because they have less cache on the chip. Kind of like a mini swap file. Things may have changed recently, but when I was into this stuff a couple years back a computer filled it's "memory" like this:
Level 1 cache
Level 2 cache
memory
hard drive cache
hard drive swap file
Each step requires more time. Your L1 cache is the fastest, then L2, memory and hard drive. Some chips like the celerons/durons had no L2 cache. The Pentium chips had a larger L1 cache AND an L2 cache. This might be different now, because I'm not up to speed on the newest stuff anymore.
That's why a 1Ghz Pentium is faster than a 1Ghz Celeron & the XP chips are faster than the Durons at the same clock speed.
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For memory, it has a speed rating too. It's more complex if you consider timing adjustments, but basically the PC-2700 is slower than PC-3200 is slower than PC-4000... get the idea?
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The hard drive is the slowest link in the chain. If you're playing a game and it stutters while reading to the hard drive to swap info, an increase in memory will help. If you're working on a large graphics file, it will start using the hard drive and slow down substantially. This is why newer drives have a larger cache and spin at higher rpms.
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I think Paige called the celeron crippled because of how chip manufacturers produce their chips. Say we wanted to make chips. A high-end chip called "Crazy Cooters" and a slower one called "Cooters". We run a batch of 4ghz "Crazy Cooter" chips. Now during our quality control, we find some of the chips have stability problems with their L2 cache. The easy solution is to just disable it and sell them as "Cooters". That way we can use the same tooling setup and make both kinds of chips. If we need slower chips, say 3.5Ghz, we just limit how fast the run. It's called "locking" the chip. All without changing the manufacturing process. This is why people can "overclock" their chips. They buy our 3.5Ghz chip and unlock it. Then they turn it up to 4Ghz. During the next 6 months, we make some small changes (called steps) to the production process. This increases our quality and now all we produce is "Crazy Cooters". Cool right? Well if the market demands "Cooters", we need to cripple some "Crazy Cooters" and fill that demand.
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