Frontside Bus?

[brian]

I know that having a lower speed bus can create a
bottleneck in system performance, but what exactly does
the frontside bus do?

My friend has a Mac with a frontside bus speed of less
than 200mhz, and a processer speed of less than 800mhz.
Do these speeds mean something different on a Mac
compared to a PC? How does his computer compare to my
2.4ghz Pentium 4 with a 500mhz frontside bus?

Thanks

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Brian,

A question better suited to the hardware group, but essentially the bus
speed represents the communications rate between hardware attached to the
bus (and we're not talking greyhound here). The higher it is, the faster
data can move over it. This read may interest you:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/19980101/busspeed-01.html

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Mike Hall]

Mac's use risc (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processors.. PC's use cisc
(Complex Instruction Set Computer) processors.. the speed quoted for either
is correct, but because of the differences in what they do and how they do
it, the two figures are not directly comparable..