Yeah they meant 3200+ you'll nowadays see 2.2GHz dual core or better which pretty much all cpu's now beat

OK, that clears it up for me. So all the newer games when it says 3.0Ghz, they mean multi-core. Thanks for the info.

3Ghz of pentium 4 or Athlon does not equal 3Ghz of current cpus.

i3 is one of intel's newest cpus yet it is technically slower than old pentium 4 which run at 3.2Ghz. yet it is way more powerful even tough it is one of the cheaper cpus on the market.

in the past Mhz and later Ghz dictated how powerful a cpu is. It was never a case tough (from technical point of view) but it was fairly close to the truth allowing cyrix, amd and intel to market their hardware based on mhz of cpu alone
For example
pentium 3 700Mhz was faster than pentium 2 500Mhz.

That changed when we reached a maximum of how fast cpus can clock. which is 4Ghz with air cooling for normal consumer hardware.
They cannot push the ghz limit anymore that's why the speed of clock stayed fairly constant over the years (there is an increase but not as big as 10 years ago for example)

Yet the speed of cpu improved. Mhz and Ghz alone do not really say which cpu is better or faster. It does say that with cpus of the same brand aka i3 with 2.0Ghz is slower than i3 with 2.4Ghz.
yet it does not mean that i3 2.0Ghz is slower than Pentium 4 2.8Ghz. as there is way more in cpu dictating the speed of the hardware.

Others already explained what extra cores do.


so don't worry about that. Some old games still say you need that many ghz to run it but it is not true anymore. Any new even the cheapest desktop cpu will crush dark Messiah.

Comparing Pentium 4 with the same generations Athlon is an interesting challenge. Intel had this very simple idea with the P3 and P4 (at least up until hyperthreading started to become "common") of "make this thing run as many laps as possible each second" (as many MHz as possible), AMD had another idea "make each lap longer, but run each lap at the same time as before" (do more each cycle).

After a while, Intel realised they couldn't keep up with the same strategy, and when starting do build consumer grade 64-bit CPUs, they gave up and licensed AMD's technology, giving them - again - relatively similar levels of performance at the same clock speed (I guess partially because their own foray into 64-bit territory on the server and high-end workstation side with the Itanium was pretty much a disaster requiring incredibly slow emulation for any backwards compatibility to 32-bit code).

Thus a 3.2 GHz P4 isn't as fast as it might seem comparing the number alone to a more recent 2 GHz processor (the latter is most definitely faster, even if running on a single core).

<disclaimer>
This history lesson is overly simplified and surely doesn't give the whole picture, but it may give you an idea.

yeah your analogy was slightly out.. it was more Intel went for really long straight highways you can go down at 100mph but only 1 car at a time (intel pipes were long so could be run at higher speed) AMD made lots of short multilane roads that you go down slower but more cars at a time(short pipes but more of them working at once)...

Thanks for that great explaination, so basically I can't directly compare old Ghz numbers with newer PC Ghz numbers, now I get it. I read somewhere that some of the really old games like Thief Gold, you have to force the CPU into single-core mode in order for it to run.
Thanks for your input. I'm starting to understand the evolution of current generation CPUs.

Good analogy, thanks for the input.

What really went wrong was this: think about what happens when one of those drivers on the single-lane highway realizes he missed his exit and stops. Either everybody on the highway has to stop and back up too, or you have to enforce sufficient following distance that the driver who doesn't belong there can back up and get off. Either way, you're making inefficient use of that road.

A combination of excessive power requirement and poor real-world performance of that long pipeline (which had grown to 31 stages in the Prescott) was what doomed the Pentium 4. What Intel did about it was very instructive. They had a branch in Haifa that was working on a low-power low-cost CPU, the Pentium M, with a short pipeline and low cache latency. Following some well-executed persuasion by the Israeli engineers ("you come to the meeting with your opinion, and you leave with mine"), Intel decided to base their next generation (Core and Core 2) on the Pentium M design.

The result was the Core 2 Duos and Quads, which instantly obsoleted the Pentium 4 and dealt AMD a competitive blow that they could only counter by becoming the low-cost alternative. Pentium M designer Rony Friedman was made a VP and has been chief of CPU design since.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003658346_intelisrael09.html

no problem and yeah. some older games are iffy when it comes to multicore cpus. it ain't that much problem as you can easily turn off cores.
just don't forget to turn them back on when running Skyrim or any other new game. :)

Older games state the required speed for an Intel Pentium 4 processor (P4). The thing to note about the P4 is that it has a very high clock speed of up to 3.8 GHz, but each of the 3800000000 cycles it has per second it gets very little work done. So a P4 might take 30 cycles to calculate something, where newer processors from 2008 or newer may only take 15 cycles to calculate the same thing. A 3.8 GHz P4 may only do as much as a 1.9 GHz AMD Phenom II and an Intel I3/5/7.

In summary although the new processors are rated in lower GHz they get a lot more work done.

In the above, I ignored multi core. In older processors like a P4, there is only 1 core to do all the work. Now most PCs have between 2 and 6 cores. For example my PC has a AMD T1090 running at 3.2GHz. The AMD T1090 has 6 cores running at 3.2 GHz. If you are running an old game, the T1090 would only use 1 core to do all the work, however newer games are multi threaded to some extent. This means that newer games can split the work into multiple streams of work so all cores can contribute to the game to make it run faster or look better.

In the above I ignored "Turbo core" and "Turbo boost". They allow the chips to over clock them self when only 50% of the cores have work. So for example a AMD 1090T with 3 busy cores could run at 3.6 GHz or it would run with 6 busy cores at 3.2 GHz. The trade off is, the faster something runs the more energy it uses.

Overall summary... If you have a PC that was purchased between 2009 and now, provided that it has a graphic card made by AMD or Nvidia, games from 2006 should run fine.

It's worse than that. A 3.8 GHz P4 will lose to a lowly Celeron 430 (1.8 GHz). Any Phenom II or Core i3 will leave it in the dust.

The reason is well covered by wodmarach's analogy. Core architecture can issue more instructions per clock, and the Netburst pipeline was subject to frequent stalls.
But with Windows' brain-dead CPU affinity, it ends up looking more like

Core 1: 12211121
Core 2: 21122212

This is not a big detriment for shared-cache CPUs like Intel's. It penalizes separate-cache CPUs like AMD's more severely.

Really, I have an old WinXP laptop with Celeron M 420 1.6Ghz, so you are saying that this laptop should be able to run the same games as a Pentium4 3.2GHz? If thats the case, I'm very happy because I never thought that it was a very fast computer for gaming.

You are looking at it the wrong way....
In these days most people have a lot of things running on their PC that they do not kill when running the game, so while your game perhaps may not utilize more than a certain amount of your collective CPU power then apllications such as A.V. , firewall , whatever , are also taking ressources. On an O.S. that are capeable to properly distriburing ressources over the things you got running then a Multi core CPU ought to be a great advantage in most cases - as far as I can see....

The Celeron M420 is not the same as the newer Celeron 420/430/440. Isn't Intel alphabet soup delicious?

The Celeron M4xx are the older Core ("Yonah") design. The newer Celeron 4xx are single-core Core 2 ("Conroe") design.

The Pentium M, and even the Celeron M, was a formidable CPU in its day. That little M420 is roughly the equal of a 2.8 GHz P4, at a fraction of the power. It is good enough to attempt games that are specified for any P4. I still have a laptop in daily use with a "Yonah" Core Duo.

OK, I understand what you are saying.
Cool, so its much more powerful than the stated 1.6Ghz.

Just with respect to the P4 (and as discussed, a lot of older games are rated according to the clock speed of the P4) and Athlon XP. Games specifically requiring a Core 2 or Athlon 64 may be too modern for it.