Author Topic: mhz vs. mbs  (Read 1452 times)

Offline Yankee

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mhz vs. mbs
« on: February 10, 2011, 04:56:08 PM »

Hi,

I have a question that has been bugging me for months.   Can't find a solid answer
anyplace.

What basic formula do you use to convert Mhz to Mbs ?

I had a DX50 32 bit machine and read the 50 mhz processor would process the 32 bit input
at the same ratio.   50 to 32.    I don't think that applies anymore or is accurate.   Granted that machine
worked solidly.

If I have a 500 mhz machine will the processor read 500 bits per second ?

Mhz always refers to cycles rather than bits, bytes, or equivalents in Mbs.


thanks in advance for your response,


Patrick013
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Offline AS

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2011, 05:17:36 PM »
you can't find the right answer because it's not  a right question:

Mhz is frequency unit, used in a CPU context it refers to clock rate
more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU#Clock_rate

MB/s is data rate unit, i.e. related to how much data you can transfer from one device to another:
more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MB/s#Megabyte_per_second

AS

Offline T6

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2011, 05:26:34 PM »
there is no equivalent because mhz is amount of times a cycle can be done on a cpu in a second and mbs is a measure of stored bits and a mhz doesn't imply that you are going to do something new with new files/info, just that you can do those cycles on that machine

in older machines this was kinda proportional but in current machines with multiple cores and doing threads knowing that a cpu most times has sections unused(the reason to use threads in first place) makes hard to say that x amount mhz can do y proportional amount of mbs

on older computers wasn't considered front bus, speed of memory and the size/type of the file to be processed, type of file matters now, not the same to handle 50 mbs of audio to 50 mbs of hd video or 50 mbs of a excell file

what you can do is run test apps like sandra or other sets of benchmarks that will let you how your machine performs when doing a specific task confronted to other machines with similar specs and other bigger ones

when reading some benchamrks in tomshardware you can see that number of cores and specific implementations over a specific technology is what matters now, the mhz race was canceled when multicores won the race
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Offline AS

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2011, 05:38:39 PM »
@ T6
@ patrick013

That means that I confused mbs with MB/s ....
Sorry about that!

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Offline Yankee

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #4 on: February 10, 2011, 05:47:47 PM »

Let me take some time to wrestle with this.

I see where I am mixing reading speed with processing capability and speed, I think.


thx

Patrick
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Offline T6

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #5 on: February 10, 2011, 08:11:56 PM »
most people, me ncluded use mb but it should be Mb or MB

in megabit or megabytes, mb is also megabytes but as you see it is a complette disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MB#MB_and_Mb_may_refer_to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MB#mb_may_refer_to

right now is MiB or mebibytes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiB
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Offline Yankee

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Re: mhz vs. mbs
« Reply #6 on: February 13, 2011, 06:39:37 PM »

there is no equivalent because mhz is amount of times a cycle can be done on a cpu in a second and mbs is a measure of stored bits and a mhz doesn't imply that you are going to do something new with new files/info, just that you can do those cycles on that machine
 

Hi,

So I am not reading so many megabytes per cycle as such, I'm doing a programming processing cycle,
like say an If-Then-Else statement on some data so many times or cycles a second.

Is that accurate what I just stated ?   


I'll get this right sooner or later.


THX

patrick
ASUS EeePc 900HA netbook  1.6 Ghz Atom CPU  1GB RAM
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