Measuring the processing power of a computer

The following factors affect the speed of a computer.

Addressing scheme: The addressing scheme is a computer design feature that directly determines the amount of main memory that can be controlled by the central processing unit at one time. Therefore, the lager the addressing capability the more main memory the computer can control.

Register size: The larger the general purpose registers, the more data the CPU can operate on in one machine cycle. Computers have a numbers of registers that, for a variety of purpose, include arithmetic operations.

Data bus capacity: The data bus is like a pipeline used to move unit and other computer system components. The size of data bus controls the amount of data that can travel down the pipeline at one time and thus can significantly affect a computer’s performance. The larger the database the more efficiently and quickly data and instructions can be moved among the processing components of the computer.

Clock speed: The clock is the part of the CPU that synchronizes and sets the speed of all the operations in the machine cycle. Therefore, the faster the clock speeds the more machine cycle are completed per second and faster the computer can perform the operations.

Instruction set: The more powerful the instruction set the fewer instructions and processing cycles it takes to perform certain tasks.