by James S » Mar 12, 2002 @ 2:43pm
The MHz is not what makes a processor "faster" or more powerful, it's the architecture of the chip, it's features. Just like the Pentium and the 486 chips. The Pentium ran at the same speed as the 486's at first but had such an improved architecture that it was incredibly faster, the first processor to be able to run Quake. The same is true for the 386 to 486 jump, and Pentium to PII, and PII to PIII, and PIII to Athlon, Athlon to P4, P4 to AthlonXP. The architecture, the design and functionality of the chip improved, not the necessarily the frequency of cycles.
You see, each cycle of a CPU can only process so much information. The better the design the more information can be processed in this one cycle.
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