Myths vs Facts: Part 1

Myths vs Facts: CPU
What is CPU and how fast should it be? This is not a computing class and I am certainly not an expert in computers. But I have seen so many of us get confused with the term CPU. Yes…I said us as people around my age and older. Those younger generation lucky bastards get to use computer even before they reach pre-school! For me, my first experience with 486DX2 66 was at my college library when I first came to Perth. Those computers were running at a “speedy” 66Mhz! Most of the people have a misconception that CPU is the “box”…yea…the “box” that attaches to your monitor. As a matter of fact, CPU actually stands for Central Processing Unit, a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single silicon chip and it actually resides in the “box”. It’s the brain of your computer and usually is given a speed in MHz, which comes the second misconception.

Myths vs Facts: MHz
MHz is actually “speed limit” that is imposed on a CPU. It’s the maximum speed that the processor can run without generating any errors. However, many modern CPUs can be run above their rated speed with some simple tweaking, and this process is called “overclocking”. Many people think that the higher the MHz, the faster and hence, better their computers are. Well, that was indeed true in most of the case until few years ago when AMD (Intel’s rival) starting to produce CPUs that run slower in MHz than most Intel counterparts but capable of much faster program execution. You will find the same situation occurs within Intel when they introduce the Core2duo family which replaces the good old Pentium 4 dual core (my current budget cheapo overclocked Core2duo E6400 running at 3.0MHz will run rings around any Pentium 4 and most AMD 2x chips out there). A big drop in MHz but a big jump in performance! So is faster MHz actually reflects in faster real time performance? Well, it’s only true if you are comparing the chips, which are produced using the same architecture and process.
Photo on the right shows the mess inside my "box" :)

Myths vs Facts: More RAM or memory = better performance?
RAM (Random Access Memory), also better known as computer memory, is considered “random access” because you can access any memory cell directly if you know the row and column that intersect at that cell. (1 cell = 1 capacitor + 1 transistor) and RAM consists of millions of them! My simple definition of RAM is “workspace” for your computer. If your computer has inadequate RAM, then your computer will be forced to make more frequent file transfer from your RAM to your hard drive cache in order to free up more RAM space, resulting in extremely slow and unresponsive system. Hence, more RAM = faster executions and productions. However, this is only true until certain RAM size is reached, and then increase in RAM will result in little or no real time performance gain but a big dent in your wallet! All but the basic Windows Vista has a minimum requirement of 1GB of RAM in order to run things smoothly. But my advice is, get at least 2GB of RAM if you are planning to run the Vista. I still can’t believe all those people out there are still trying to sell new computers with 512MB RAM for Windows Vista…and worse still, with completely obsolete CPU technology!