> >I also cheated slightly (and I'm surprised that other old-hands
> didn't pick
> >me up on it). Although the clock ticked at 40MHz, it took at least four
> >ticks to do anything --- just as the 4MHz Z80A did.
>
> Why bother calling it 40MHz then? Why not call it 10MHz?
> Marketing, make it
> seem 4 times faster than it is? Even those greedy crooks at Intel don't do
> that...
It was my understanding that the first x86 machines were incapable of
completing instructions in a single clock cycle. For example, the 8086/8088
took 2-3 cycles just for an integer add.
Nowadays you can do multiple instructions in a single cycle, using
pipelining, but you don't "increase" the apparent MHz speed. That's why
comparisons between RISC and CISC fall flat if you only look at clock speed.
A RISC running at 800MHz might take more clock cycles to do what a CISC can
do in 1 cycle at 400MHz, for example.
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