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From: lee@sed170.HAC.COM (John Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Motorola vs Intel (who's faster?)
Keywords: Amiga runs at 3.5 MHZ?
Message-ID: <9498@hacgate.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jul 90 22:31:20 GMT
References: <1990Jul10.055108.22796@agate.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@hacgate.UUCP
Reply-To: lee@sed170.UUCP (John Lee)
Organization: Hughes Aircraft Co., El Segundo, CA
Lines: 44

In article <1990Jul10.055108.22796@agate.berkeley.edu> joechung@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Joeseph Chung) writes:
>A friend of mine said the other day that Motorola rates its CPU's twice as
>fast.  So in effect, my Amiga's running at a little over 3.5 MHZ.
>
>One of the reason he sights is that: Motorola & Intel are about the same
>level in technology, and yet Motorola has come out with a 50MHZ chip already
>while Intel is still around 33MHZ.  Therefore, the actual speed of the
>Motorola chips are 1/2 what the manufacturer says.
[...]

Silly, silly, silly...  Your friend is wrong.

The speed ratings on a chip is the maximum guarenteed clock rate the chip
will accept and is related to the chip design and manufacturing process,
among other things.  Motorola does not divide the clock rate by two internally
so that they can stamp a higher clock rating on the package.  (The clock
actually _is_ divided internally (I think) but to generate different on-chip
clocks.  Parts of the chip run at the full clock rate.)

The maximum clock rate of Intel chips may be lower because of different and
possibly more difficult specifications and the difficult design and
manufacturing process problems needed to match the specifications.

This is not to say that one is better than another.  I'll leave that
discussion to comp.processors.wars.

The relative speed of two different processors cannot, repeat, *cannot* be
compared using clock rates.  One chip may use fewer clock cycles than
another to execute an equivalent instruction, thus the former running at
a lower clock rate can actually execute instructions faster than latter
at a higher clock rate.  Hence the "MIPS" (Millions of Instructions Per
Second) ratings.  Even then there is much controversy as to what a MIPS
comparision between processors actually means between different processors.

This not meant to be a flame--I apologize if it appears so.

--John Lee
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The above opinions are those of the user and not of those of this machine.