Geek On The Mountain

Processor Speed

I see confusion over processor speed all the time. I recently saw a discussion on an article noting that Intel is moving away from just cranking up the “speed” and I was reminded of the problem.

The word speed is deceptive. When I say speed here, I’ll be referring to the number of cycles per second that the processor is running at (Hz). On the other hand, speed could also refer to how fast things actually happen, but I refer to that as performance. The difference is pretty simple. My computer cycles about 1.5 billion times per second (GHz) (I’ll mention what exactly a cycle is in a moment), but it’s performance is something that I would actually measure using some sort of benchmarking software. I might measure anything from the number of arithmetic operations it can do per second to how long it takes to start up a certain program (though the latter in particular starts to deal with much more of the computer than just the CPU).

A cycle is simply the smallest unit of time in which the processor can accomplish something. A processor may be able to perform several operations during the course of one cycle. What exactly happens during each cycle differs with each type of processor. This is a very important point. Not all cycles are created equal. An AMD Athlon processor running at 1.5GHz will not be doing the same amount of work as a P4 running at 1.5GHz. The Athlon will actually perform better. Because of this, to a point, an Athlon will outperform a faster (think Hz here) P4. This can be deceiving because most people have been trained over the years to look for a faster processor for better performance, and it used to be pretty much dead true. For this reason, AMD went to a numbering scheme a couple of years back so that their slower processors would have the same numbers as the equivalently performing P4. It’s good to note as well that although the speed is usually safe to compare to the same family of processors (comparing a P4 to a P4 for instance), even that is not always the case. You might expect a 3.0 GHz P4 to perform about 7% (3.0/2.8 – 1) better than a 2.8GHz P4, but it’s altogether possible that different features were added to the faster version and the difference in performance is actually greater than 7%. (this was actually backwards when comparing P3’s to P4’s running at the same speed).

To give a very general explanation, as a processor runs faster, it produces more heat. This heat means that a more limited number of operations can be performed during each cycle (too much heat will cause the processor to fail (2 + 2 CAN equal 5… ). By lowering the speed, less heat is produced and more operations can be performed during each cycle (but with fewer cycles per second, this doesn’t mean it’s just doing a ton more work).

You might be wondering at this point how exactly you do tell if one processor is faster than another. I think that for most people, it doesn’t much matter because they’re not doing anything that they need tons of speed for. On the other hand, if you really need performance (gaming, video encoding, etc), like getting the most bang for your buck or are just currious, then you need to actually check out some benchmarks that people have ran on different processors. A good site to check out is Tom’s Hardware Guide. They have lots of benchmarks. There are also many other sites that do the same thing. Google is your friend. Of course too, a system’s overall performance isn’t just all about the CPU, so if you’re looking at a particular system you might search for reviews on it as well. On the other hand, the old MHz and numbering systems do provide at least a rough guide of what’s faster than the next thing. Just don’t think that since one has a slightly higher number than another that it’s necessarily faster.

My point here is that MHz does not equal performance and more importantly that you can’t just compare two different chips based on MHz alone (and perhaps not even by the “number” given by the manufacturer). This is of waning importance because focus is moving away from the MHz (or GHz) ratings these days. For most people it doesn’t really matter anyways. The actual performance of a system depends on a lot more than the performance of the CPU on it’s own. (the performance of the CPU as the rest of the system sees it depends on a lot of other things too..). That’s just something that always bugged me so I though I’d confuse everyone even more

Popularity: 2% [?]

Comments(1)

I have found a couple of God FAQs. One is more verbose while the other is more short and to the point.

If you don’t like those, you could always read about kissing hank’s ass.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Comments(0)

There’s seemingly so little sense in me reposting what Milenka already has, so I’ll just point to her two posts that have pictures of our new cats. They’re named Firefox and Wiki which are both geeky and yet at least somewhat appropriate in that one has a lot of red and the other one rather reminded us of an ewok and the first ewok I think of is Wicket which then shortens nicely to Wiki. Firefox is supposed to be mine whereas Wiki is supposed to be Milenka’s.. I love persians. They’re already being wonderful cats… these are number 24 and 25 by the way

Popularity: 3% [?]

Comments(2)

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m a closet copyright activist. Well, sort of at least. Admittedly, I haven’t done much more than send off a few emails and faxes and post my thoughts to some message boards. I always mean to do more, but most of my day goes towards school and work these days and of course there’s always spending time with Milenka, eating and sleeping to consider… Plus I have an insatiable love for the dead doing nothing, and that doesn’t help either.

I can sadly say that I originally meant to write something about all of this back in July. That was when I read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I highly recommend this book if you have any curiosity about what is happening with copyrights at all (or should you develop one in the near future..). I knew quite a bit about copyrights from information I’d gathered here and there over the years, but this book brought it all together. Most of it was stuff I’d heard before but there were some new things as well. I’d certainly never seen anything quite so complete, though admittedly I’d never looked for a book. By the way, you can download the book for free using that link. It’s released under a creative commons license, which I’ll talk about some other time. It basically says you can do anything you want with it as long as you give the author credit and it is for non-commercial purposes. You can read it, pass copies around and even use it in things you make as long as you follow those two rules (there’s a link on the site that explains exactly).

I don’t think most people understand exactly what copyrights are. They are a limited protection of certain works for a limited time (that is the intent anyways). It allows me to specify how my work gets copied. There are certain rights referred to as “fair use” that allow individuals to make copies/parts of copies in certain situations regardless of the copyright. When the copyright expires, the works go into the public domain. This means that they’re free for use by anyone. It isn’t quite as free as one might imagine because individual translations, performances, etc can be copyrighted, but the heart of the matter is still free. The idea here is that a free exchange of ideas will promote new ones. To some people, this almost seems a contradictory idea given our capitalist nature. Giving away free books might take away from local shops selling said books, after all.

I first became really interested in copyrights around the time of the whole Napster phenomenon. I was in high school at the time and being a geek I was of course interested in what was going on with Napster on all levels. From there onward I followed the course of the filesharing networks as well as other ploys by the music industry to try to make music secure (there were many attempts to make CD’s uncopyable that mostly resulted in some CD players unable to play them as well..). I think this was a natural extension of something I had been interested in since I started using computers years earlier, which was the copyright protection put forth on video games. For anyone who never played computer games in the olden days (most prevalent before CD’s), many of them did some check at startup and/or periodically throughout the game as you played. The check was usually something like “please enter the third word on the sixth line of page 32 of the manual”. It might give you a couple of chances (different question each time though) and if you got it wrong the program wouldn’t run. There were lots of variations (involving the manual/other documentation that came with the game as well as other methods), but this was the most common as I remember it. The whole thing was a game of cat and mouse. Crackers (not the crackers of today, which are technically what most of the public thinks of as hackers (someone who breaks into places and does whatever)) would release patches to get around this stuff so that copies could be run without the manual and/or the original disk(s). Software companies would come up with some innovative new way of protecting their software and the crackers would come up with some innovative new way of breaking it. We see the same thing today with the p2p networks. One gets shutdown and new ones that are more difficult to shut down arise to replace it.

Anyways, there’s a lot of issues here. Going back to my game example, the programs released by crackers were definitely used by people to just make copies and avoid paying for software. On the other hand, they were also used by people who actually owned the software who didn’t want to keep the manual around and look stuff up all the time. The same issue arises with programs like DeCSS (original program to break DVD encryption) and all p2p networks today. They can be used for illegal purpose, but there are legit reasons for their use as well. Unfortunately, we have laws such as the DMCA that make all uses of some things like this illegal (the DMCA was cause to make DeCSS illegal even though it’s original purpose was to allow DVD playback on linux).

As stated in the US constitution, the purpose of copyrights is to further creativity. Often times these days the purpose is to generate money for copyright holders. I don’t have the exact numbers on me, but the length of a copyright term has been extended many times in the past 50 years. A good example is that whenever Steamboat Willie comes up to enter the public domain Disney lobbies and suddenly it’s covered again. I think copyright currently covers works for something like 90 years unless you’re an individual, in which case it covers for 70 years after you die. My numbers probably aren’t exactly correct here, but that’s the basic idea. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider publishing anything if I knew I’d only be getting money for 50 years after I was dead. It’s a good thing we’ve extended it as far as we have. Copyrights are supposed to be limited, but they’re not really limited if we just extent the term every time things are about ready to enter the public domain. It’s good to note as well that probably 95%+ works from that era aren’t brining in money anymore. Those works are getting drug along for the ride and they’re not publicly available for no real reason.

What we’re seeing is a shift in power. It’s moving away from the public and towards the copyright holders. Why and how? Certain groups have a lot of money to gain by maintaining their monopoly and they’re willing to spend the money to lobby congress to get their way. Fair use rights are going down the tubes. Even in cases where they are still there, the way our legal system is setup it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself. Let’s take the RIAA for example. They’re suing filesharers. Ok. Are these people all guilty? Does it matter? No particularly. Probably some of them (I’m sure many of them couldn’t even come close though) could argue fair use rights for what they’re sharing. Here’s the problem. The RIAA (or any large organization) will be able to through a lot of lawyers and money at the case. By the time Joe Fileshare pays a lawyer (or lawyers even) and they spend tons of time (and therefore money) navigating the legal system and win, they may burn through $50, $100, $200+ thousand. The RIAA offers a settlement of $10,000. It might suck down all of someone’s life savings, but it’s cheaper than going the other way. The law is so fuzzy that it often becomes impossible for most people to fight.

There are so many sub-topics here. I can make a lot of posts out of all of this. Expect more sometime in the next 6 months ;P

Popularity: 3% [?]

Comments(0)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Comments(0)