BB Torch 9800 :: Clock Speed Is Not An Indicator Of Processing Power

First off, I returned my Torch because of software problems that I couldn't wait to be fixed; namely the BT streaming glitch. That said, I have noticed some commentary regarding the Torch processor speed that I see as seriously ignorant and wanted to provide some insight.Processing power is not a function of clock speed. Processing power is a function of the elegance of the instruction set, the design of the processor's peripheral registers and buses, and the programmer's competence.What does this mean? A very simple processor will have lots and lots of instructions that you can use to build the machine code. Also, a simple processor will have registers to accept instructions and registers to respond linearly to what was input, with no peripheral registers. Think of a box with a chute where something comes in and a chute of identical size where something comes out. In contrast, an elegant processor design will have very few instructions, will have peripheral registers, and require a much more intelligent programmer to utilize.

For this type of processor imagine a box with a chute where something comes in, a chute where something comes out, and chutes all around the sides of the box where specific products automatically come out that can be used to make something without more coming into the "input" chute. FYI, the elegant processor has fewer instructions because it already performs automatically many of the functions that require an instruction and extra clock cycle on simple processors.

A processor works by taking the product that comes out, storing it, waiting for more product to come out, then combining products to come up with usable data. Obviously the faster you pump out products, the faster you make something usable. But what if the elegant processor has products coming out the side chutes automatically, without being told by the programmer, that can be used to keep from having to input and output info over and over to come up with the same end product? Well, it can work more slowly and accomplish more in less time, because the design is sophisticated and the programmer knows how to instruct it. Think of the products coming out of the side chutes on a good processor as products that come out the end on simple processors. The simple processor needs extra instructions, and consequently extra clock cycles of output going to the input over and over, to make specific products come out that the elegant processor simply places on the side chutes without being asked. For this reason, good processors usually have fewer instructions to use.

Let's go back to the year 1997. You had Intel Pentium, AMD Athlon and Duron, and Motorola processors, in general. Intel has always had many instructions, few peripheral registers, and fast clock speeds. Motorola always had a very simple instruction set, peripheral registers, and relatively slow clock speeds. AMD fit in between.What did everyone buy? Well, of course Intel because Intel was faster. But guess what? My AMD at 700 MHz smoked the crap out of an Intel at 1 GHz. Did the Intel fan boys care, or know what they were talking about? Of course not. We all know that old Macs with Motorolas killed PCs with Intel processors of identical speed and did not require ultra high processing speeds such as Intel.

Intels have historically been designed for newbs to utilize. They have (or at least had) an instruction set and overall design that requires an ignorant programmer to use clock cycles for every single calculation. The Motorola was designed for intelligent people to program however. The Motorola will yield usable data(on the side chutes) that can be used, or not used, for every clock cycle that can be combined with output to effectively stack data in one clock cycle that an Intel will need at least 2-3 cycles to produce by going from output to input over and over. Thus, the Intel has to be significantly faster than the competition to do the same work. I suspect that Intel, over the last 10-12 years, has caught up with the overall quality of its processors because the top speed is changing little while their productivity is rising quickly.