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Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Factors affecting processing speed of a CPU

Better performance of a computer is directly related to the processing speed of CPU. Some of the factors that affect CPU performance are registers, data bus, address bus, external bus, internal computer clock, main memory and cache memory. The size of the register matters and for bigger sized registers, computer processing speed is greater. A 32-bit register processor works twice as fast as 16-bit register processor. On increasing the number registers, processing speed increases. A bus is a group of wires that carry information from one hardware unit to other hardware unit in a computer. On increasing the size of the data bus (number of wires in the bus), processing speed can be increased. A CPU which uses 32-bit data bus works twice as fast as a CPU which uses 16-bit data bus. On increasing the number of bits in the address bus, processor speed can be increased. A group of wires which are connected to CPU and external peripherals is known as external bus. Processing speed of a computer depends on the internal computer clock speed. The clock speed is the rate at which the processor processes the information which is normally measured in MHz or GHz. A processor with higher clock speeds process data faster than those with lower clock speeds. CPU performance depends on size of the main memory (RAM). A memory element which acts as an intermediate storage between CPU and main memory is known as cache memory. A CPU with cache memory works faster than a CPU without cache memory.

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