questions about processor speed vs memory speed

[kenshin]

Alrighty, recently my friend and I got in a discussion about processor speed and memory speed and since I have no clue about any of that stuff (i'm a software kinda guy), I decided to find out if what he's saying is real, or just stuff he pulled out from you know where.

He says that processors are merely multipliers and don't really have speeds. When I mentioned memory he said pc100, pc133, pc150, etc and said that your actual memory type is what your processor speed will be. He then used math such as: pc100 * 8 = 800 mhz. I thought that processor "speed?" was not dependent on memory speed. I thought it was stand alone. I had heard of different types of memory and the faster ones were better, but he merely said if I had a 133mhz memory, that my actual processor was then only 600 since pc100s were standard? Okay, I really don't make sense, but you get the general nature of my question, could you tell please tell me the real deal? I tend to be wary about his rants since he often times is full of it.

Kenshin

[Paleo Pete]

I think your friend should watch out about Thanksgiving, someone's liable to try and shove him in the oven, cause he's full of stuffin'...

CPU and memory speeds are independent of each other. The speed of each has an effect on overall system performance, but the CPU speed is not determined by memory speed. If you switch from PC100 to PC133 memory, your CPU will still run at 600MHz.

I think the multiplier he's referring to is the system bus, which can be 33, 50, 66 or 100MHz, and the CPU runs at a multiple of that bus speed. My P-200, for instance, runs at 200MHz, but the system bus is 66MHz. When I set up the motherboard to build the system I have to set a jumper on the board to tell it to run at 66MHz, and a multiplier of 3. 66x3=198, but you'll never notice the missing 2...And I think a new 133MHz system bus has recently been introduced.

Memory speed is also measured in MHz, that's the number behind the name. PC100 is 100MHz, PC133 runs at 133MHz. The only affect that has is that by adding more memory the overall system performance will generally increase, except in a few cases when the motherboard can only cache 64MB memory, then adding more will actually slow it down.

The only difference switching from PC100 to PC133 will make is, assuming the motherboard supports the 133MHz memory, it will allow faster memory performance. It will not affect the CPU speed at all, just increase overall performance.

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