Tony Hill wrote:
That was all well and good when we were talking about 1 vs. 2 clock
cycles, but those days are LONG since past (for better or for worse).
Measuring a bus by it's data rate is in no way marketing, it's the
only worthwhile way to measure a bus! Would you prefer a P4 bus that
is "somewhere in the 70 to 350 clock cycle range" description? How
does that even begin to remotely help anyone?!

I agree... but using MHz it's confusing. A DDR bus clocked at 200MHz is
fine. Calling it a 400MHz bus is confusing... it is neither data rate
(which would be in bits per second) nor the clock.

It's about time that the marketing types got a clue. How many times have
people come here and asked why they can't set their ram to 400MHz or some
other rediculous question?

Most even semi-remotely technical info about processor specs lists
both the clock speed of the bus and the bandwidth, and that's for
desktop processors.

You need to know 3 of: clock speed, number of transfers per clock, bus width
and bandwidth.

The clock speed (or at least effective clock
speed with today's double and quad data rate buses)

Clock speed is clock speed, regardless of the number of transfers that
happen per clock.

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...