cpu-speed

I'm trying to find out if there is anyway to get an idea of the CPU frequency of the system my C code is running on. To clarify, I'm looking for an abstract solution, (one that will not be tied to a specific architecture or OS) which can give me an idea of the operating frequency of the computer that my code is executing on. I don't need to be exact, but I'd like to be in the ball park (ie. I have a 2.2GHz processor, I'd like to be able to tell in my program that I'm within a few hundred MHz of that) Does anyone have an idea use standard C code? Yunchi How you find the CPU frequency is both

Years ago I was learning about x86 assembler, CPU pipelining, cache misses, branch prediction, and all that jazz. It was a tale of two halves. I read about all the wonderful advantages of the lengthy pipelines in the processor viz instruction reordering, cache preloading, dependency interleaving, etc. The downside was that any deviation for the norm was enormously costly. For example, IIRC a certain AMD processor in the early-gigahertz era had a 40 cycle penalty every time you called a function through a pointer (!) and this was apparently normal. This is not a negligible "don't worry about it

I hear everyone talking about how multi-threading can improve performance. I don't believe this, unless there is something I'm missing. If I have an array of 100 elements and traversing it takes 6 seconds. When I divide the work between two threads, the processor would have to go through the same amount of work and therefore time, except that they are working simultaneously but at half the speed. Shouldn't multi threading make it even slower? Since you need additional instructions for dividing the work? For a simple task of iterating 100 elements multi-threading the task will not provide a

Programs like CPUz are very good at giving in depth information about the system (bus speed, memory timings, etc.) However, is there a programmatic way of calculating the per core (and per processor, in multi processor systems with multiple cores per CPU) frequency without having to deal with CPU specific info. I am trying to develop a anti cheating tool (for use with clock limited benchmark competitions) which will be able to record the CPU clock during the benchmark run for all the active cores in the system (across all processors.) I'll expand on my comments here. This is too big and in