Assignment #2, Orders of Magnitute question

1) Comodore 64 = 64 K = 64*1024 bytes = 65536 bytes. A 1 gig computer has 1*1024*1024*1024 bytes = 1073741824 bytes. Therefore a 1 gig computer woud have 16384 times more bytes of memory than a comodore 64.

2) A floppy disk can store 800K. A DVD can store 4.7GB of data. 4.7GB=4.7*1024= 4812.8MB=4812.8*1024= 4928307.2K. Therefore a DVD can store 6160 worth of floppy disks.

3) During my 'surfing' I found that the "The original IBM PC (c. 1981) had a clock rate of 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 cycles/second)" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate).

In terms of comparing processor clock rates of computers with respect to factors of speed, wikipedia is once again useful when it is explained that:

The clock rate of a computer is only useful for providing comparisons between computer chips in the same processor family. An IBM PC with an Intel 486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast as one with the same CPU, memory and display running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors with different functionality. Furthermore, there are many other factors to consider when comparing the speeds of entire computers, like the clock rate of the computer's front side bus (FSB), the clock rate of the RAM, the width in bits of the CPU's bus and the amount of Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 cache.
Clock rates should not be used when comparing different computers or different processor families. Rather, some software benchmark should be used. Clock rates can be very misleading since the amount of work different computer chips can do in one cycle varies. For example, RISC CPUs tend to have simpler instructions than CISC CPUs (but higher clock rates), and superscalar processors can execute more than one instruction per cycle, yet it is not uncommon for them to do "less" in a clock cycle. In addition, subscalar CPUs or use of parallelism can also affect the quality of the computer regardless of clock rate.

Nevertheless, computers today boast processor clock rates which are superior to the original IBM PC (circa 1981) clock rate of 4.77MHZ. My iBook G4 (2004), for example, has a processor speed of 1.07 GHZ.

For definitions of Hz, MHz, GHz click on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHz.

So the IBM PC with a clock rate of 4.77 MHz = 4.77 * 10^6=4770000Hz, is at least 224 times slower than my iBook G4 which has a clock rate of 1.07*10^9=1070000000Hz. But as noted from the wikipedia source above, the RAM, frontside buss speed and cache levels, I would estimate that my iBook is infact 3*224 faster than the IBM PC (c. 1981).