im not grasping it... 1.86ghz outperforming cpus that are higher in frequency? I know it sounds dumb but im a newbie so bare with me. is it because of higer (1066mhz) fsb?
O.K.. well on cpu's they are designed differently.. so they can perform like shit or they can be very efficient.. anotherwards they can perform like crap (Netburst) or they can be efficient like amd's architecture and intel's conroe architecture.. if you know anything frequency is the rotations per clock. so when you make that, u want to get as much done as possible in that rotation. and with coroes new architecture, it is very efficient and does the most per rotation as it can theirfore making it faster. say for istance the intel Pentium 4 3.6 well my AMD64 3700 can beat the P4 because it is designed much better, even though the P4 has the better clock speeds.
Basically, he is saying that his AMD64 does more instructions per cycle than his P4 does. SO even though the P4 cycles faster, it does less work per cycle. ~Rich
If you are planning on getting a Conroe, I would recommend the E6600 as it is the first run up the ladder with the built in 4MB layer 2 Cache. Size matters in the performance as well and having the extra capacity here increases the performance as the CPU does not have to address the RAM/HDD as often. The good thing about the Conroe over the AMD’s as well as the larger size, is the dynamic way that the cache can be allocated to either of the cores, so 1 core with intensive application running on it can take the whole 4MB cache if required, and only if the other core needs cache, is the cache then adjusted over the cores, but this is still done on an as needed basis not a 50-50 regardless. Intel has really produced a top quality CPU with the Conroe’s.