Internal speed of the cpu

[shlib92]

what is the point of internal speed of cpu if the external speed, meaning the ram can not supply it? is it just for movement between cache and pipelines?

 

[sminlal]

The CPU gets most of it's memory accesses satisfied from the on-chip caches, so the speed of bulk RAM is not that big a factor. For example, if the cache hit rates are 90%, then only 10% of accesses actually need to wait for RAM. This means that if you were able to make the RAM go, say, 20% faster, then the overall improvement in CPU performance would only be about 2%.