" 16 Mhz "- What does this mean? how is this different to a 100Mhz processer?
As has been pointed out
you can not compare one 16Mhz processor to a totally different 100Mhz processor and decide one is better than the other. It really boils down to, as 6677 said, the number of instructions per cycle. I once built a computer with a 120Mhz processor. I upgraded to a 100Mhz processor and it was actually noticeably faster. It was faster because the new chip was crunching more instructions per clock cycle.
Your questions are more likely to make themselves apparent as you try to compare more similar clock speeds across different microcontrollers.
Here is a cutout from the
Here is a cutout from the datasheet for the atmega328 arduino chip.
If you look at the last column for each instruction these are the clock cycles time it takes to complete that instruction.
You'll notice some take 1 cycle and others take more. At 16 MHz your atmega 328 can execute 16 million single clock cycle instructions per second. Or looking it another way your single cycle instruction takes just 62.5 nanoseconds to complete.
These are the native instructions to the processor. Known as assembly language.
When you use the arduino IDE the code you write consists of many of these instructions.
These days cpu's in computers don't simply rely on clock speed to accomplish more in less time they use a lot of other tricks you can read about on dedicated sites.
Microcontrollers are slowly following the cpu trail but for now you can safely say that the faster the clock speed of the microcontroller the more instructions it will execute in a given time.
Thanks for the answers, More
Thanks for the answers, More understandable than what I found on google.
The whole thing made sense after I learned to program my arduino using pure C (used to use arduino language). So the higher the frequency the more instructions can be executed per second ;-), Got that now