What Your Computer Does While You Wait : Gustavo Duarte

What Your Computer Does While You Wait : Gustavo Duarte

What Your Computer Does While You Wait

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"