CPU FAQs

Q: What is Centrino Mobile Technologhy?

A: Representing Intel’s best technology for mobile PCs, Intel Centrino mobile technology includes a new mobile processor, related chipsets and 802.11 wireless network functions that have been optimized, tested and validated to work together. In addition to wireless communications, Intel Centrino mobile technology includes features designed to enable extended battery life, thinner and lighter notebook designs, and outstanding mobile performance.

Q: What is Mobile Pentium 4 processor?
A: Built on 0.13-micron process technology and Intel® NetBurst™ microarchitecture, the Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor – M provides superior capabilities for graphics-intensive multimedia applications. It’s also excellent for processor-intensive background computing tasks, such as compression, encryption, and virus scanning.
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® technology helps to optimize application performance and power consumption, and Deeper Sleep Alert State, a dynamic power management mode, adjusts voltage during brief periods of inactivity—even between keystrokes—for longer battery life.

Q: What is Mobile Pentium 4 processor?

A: Built on 0.13-micron process technology and Intel® NetBurst™ microarchitecture, the Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor – M provides superior capabilities for graphics-intensive multimedia applications. It’s also excellent for processor-intensive background computing tasks, such as compression, encryption, and virus scanning.
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® technology helps to optimize application performance and power consumption, and Deeper Sleep Alert State, a dynamic power management mode, adjusts voltage during brief periods of inactivity—even between keystrokes—for longer battery life.

Q: What is Pentium 4 processor?

A: The microprocessors from Intel. Features such as a 32-bit microprocessor, hyper-pipelined technology, a rapid execution engine and a 400MHz or 533MHz system bus that delivers three times the bandwidth of the Pentium III processor are designed to enhance online gaming, digital video and photography, speech recognition and MP3 encoding. Current speeds run from1.4 to 3.06 GHz.
The Pentium 4 processor also features:

• New Level 1 cache technology – Execution Trace Cache, which delivers a higher performance instruction cache than the Pentium III through a more efficient use of cache memory.
• NetBurst microarchitecture doubles the pipelength depth to 20 stages, and increases the frequency capability.
• Streaming SIMD extension 2 (SSE2) — 144 new instructions, a 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double precision floating point instructions.
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Q: What is the Pentium processor?

A:A 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1993. It contains 3.3 million transistors, nearly triple the number contained in its predecessor, the 80486 chip. Though still in production, the Pentium processor has been superseded by the Pentium Pro and Pentium II microprocessors. Since 1993, Intel has developed the Pentium III and more recently the Pentium 4 microprocessors.

Q: What is the Celeron processor?

A: A brand name for a line of Intel microprocessors introduced in June, 1998. Celeron chips are based on the same P6 architecture as the Pentium III microprocessor, but are designed for economical or valued PCs. They run at lower clock speeds and are not as expandable as Pentium III microprocessors.

Q: What is CPU?

A: Abbreviation of central processing unit, and pronounced as separate letters. The CPU is the brains of the computer. Sometimes referred to simply as the processor or central processor, the CPU is where most calculations take place. In terms of computing power, the CPU is the most important element of a computer system.
On large machines, CPUs require one or more printed circuit boards. On personal computers and small workstations, the CPU is housed in a single chip called a microprocessor.

Two typical components of a CPU are:
The arithmetic logic unit (ALU), which performs arithmetic and logical operations.
The control unit, which extracts instructions from memory and decodes and executes them, calling on the ALU when necessary.

Q: What is clock speed?

A: Also called clock rate, the speed at which a microprocessor executes instructions. Every computer contains an internal clock that regulates the rate at which instructions are executed and synchronizes all the various computer components. The CPU requires a fixed number of clock ticks (or clock cycles) to execute each instruction. The faster the clock, the more instructions the CPU can execute per second.
Clock speeds are expressed in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz).

The internal architecture of a CPU has as much to do with a CPU’s performance as the clock speed, so two CPUs with the same clock speed will not necessarily perform equally. Whereas an Intel 80286 microprocessor requires 20 cycles to multiply two numbers, an Intel 80486 or later processor can perform the same calculation in a single clock tick. (Note that clock tick here refers to the system’s clock, which runs at 66 MHz for all PCs.) These newer processors, therefore, would be 20 times faster than the older processors even if their clock speeds were the same. In addition, some microprocessors are superscalar, which means that they can execute more than one instruction per clock cycle.

Like CPUs, expansion buses also have clock speeds. Ideally, the CPU clock speed and the bus clock speed should be the same so that neither component slows down the other. In practice, the bus clock speed is often slower than the CPU clock speed, which creates a bottleneck. This is why new local buses, such as AGP, have been developed.