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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Scumbria who wrote (51716)3/5/1999 11:26:00 AM
From: Ali Chen  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1572777
 
Scumbria, <..idea what a "short-tick" processor is.>
This is that tiny "architecture thing" our buddy
Yousef failed to recognize from the "heights" of
his "degree", but which provides a major frequency
advantage for Intel.

Regards,
- Ali



To: Scumbria who wrote (51716)3/5/1999 11:58:00 PM
From: grok  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1572777
 
'I have no idea what a "short-tick" processor is.'

This is DEC-speak. A clock cycle is called a tick. Alpha is said by its designers to be short tick because it has an extremely high clock rate but doesn't do a whole lot in a cycle. It also has a long pipeline. When StrongARM was microarchitected they went with long tick (and shorter pipe) so that they would have decent performance without such a high clock rate because they were more power sensitve. Kind of like Speed Demons vs Brainiacs that Linnley Gwennap used to talk about.

Generally, short tick has won in PCs and Workstations while long tick is used for embedded.