Processor Performance

[SMSbeaM]

Hey

I was in a lecture today and my professor became sidetracked and began talking about the factors affecting processor performance.
He just touched on it and didnt go into detail, but i have a feeling he was creating poetic liscence.

Would anyone care to elaborate on the factors which affect processors speed, performance etc etc. Obviously compairing something recent for example the AM2 architecture with Core 2.

I know the obvious facts on Clock speed, FSB, Multipliers, the affects of differing levels of cache, hypertransport, instruction sets, bit width, addressing and well thats all i can think of right now.

But am i missing something?

[martini161]

core architecture is one of if not the most important factor. for example, if you downclocked a pentium 4 to 500mhz, it would still perform much much better than a pentium 3 or 2 at that speed

[SMSbeaM]

What factors affect core architecture?

Do you mean instruction sets, number of transistors?

He mentioned a list of buses but as far as i knew the main buses were front side, back side and hypertransport. He also said they were comparable to affect processor performance I dont know of any other buses or how they can play as big a role as clock or fsb speed.

[dkarko]

core architecture is one of if not the most important factor. for example, if you downclocked a pentium 4 to 500mhz, it would still perform much much better than a pentium 3 or 2 at that speed

Especially for p4 i believe this is not exactly true. Willamette P4s if i remember correctly, were perfoming poorer than Tualatin P3 (which were clocked lower). But, this proves the point about core architecture.

[martini161]

yes its affected by the number of transistors and how efficent the core is