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Computing (FOLDOC) dictionary
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jargon Advertising raw clock speed, instead of busspeed.
IBM uses raw clock speed as the speed of the computer. In
the IBM PC and IBM PC XT, the clock is divided by 4 to
produce the 4-phase bus clocks. Thus a 4 MHz IBM XT really
runs at 0.895 MHz, because that 4 MHz was really 3.58 MHz
which gets divided by four.
A Tandy Color Computer ran at exactly the same speed, but
clock speed was specified as bus speed, 0.895 MHz, leaving the
impression that it was 4 times slower. Actually it ran a
little faster with a more efficient instruction set. If the
actual clock frequency had been specified on a CoCo 3, it
would have been 14.32 MHz, although the bus speed was still
0.895 MHz. That high speed also generated video, color, and