What Your Computer Does While You Wait

[somanyholes]

grabbed from google cache as link is down. Informative read.

This post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I've tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums. Time units are nanoseconds (ns, 10-9 seconds), milliseconds (ms, 10-3 seconds), and seconds (s). Throughput units are in megabytes and gigabytes per second. Let's start with CPU and memory, the north of the northbridge:

http://64.233.183.132/search?q=cache:n1L5gK5nA0UJ:duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait+http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[Rik]

Great stuff, So.  I've always gone for the fastest hard drives and the largest amount of RAM I can afford, it seems the approach is still valid.

[Steve]

Yes good article. must read again when awake.