Today’s study was a bit more fun. That may be because I found a free download at www.cpuid.com which tells me what processor I have. All the information on different tabs with a nice gif on the front saying this laptop is a Pentium M Dothan chip. That is much better than screwdrivers and poking around in the dusty interior. I was never cutout to be a PC technician. Thats a handy little software tool. Im going to try it on my old desktop PC. From the 2005 receipt Ive worked out it could be an AMD Sempron on a 754 motherboard. Is that a K8 chip? Im not sure…(pause to swap machines)… This PC has an AMD Athlon 64 3000 NewCastle. It takes DDR RAM and both bits of 512Mb RAM are showing. Ive found that the CPU uses registers for temporary storage of internal commands and data. The external data bus provides a channel for the flow of data and commmands between the CPU and RAM. The address bus enables the CPU to communicate with the chipset. The Core 2 Duo CPU has a 64-bit data bus and two 64-KB L1 caches. A cache allows the CPU to continue working during pipeline stalls. The Athlon Thunderbird used a PGA package and ran on a double pumped frontside bus. When installing an Athlon 64 X2 processor, you should check the clock speed of the CPU, clock multiplier of the CPU, voltage settings on the motherboard and system clock speed. AMD and Intel motherboards and processors are not cross-compatible. The Intel Core Duo has dual processors, a definite advantage over the Pentium M. There is a lot to take in, but I think I understand overclocking, hyperthreading, throttling, caching and the difference between real and actual speed. (well, for now anyway.)
Filed under: Personal Computer Components
