Quote Originally Posted by Johan View Post
Aside of those issues, is there really a " performance" differences by clocking the PIC higher ? Better processing speed ?

I am new to PIC, but I guess as it happens on PC , the higher the frequency, the better is the performance ( 3,2 Ghz vs. 1.6 Ghz )

Wrong !

A 3000 MHz Sempron running on a bad motherboard (integrated graphics and/or SIS) is slower than a fine Centrino (Pentium III-fellow) with about 1600 MHz !


For the PICs:
You must look at your demands...
All the "normal" things can be done by 4MHz...
Very-Low-Power may use 32kHz RC,
CAN-Bus may require 16MHz or more,
USB requires 48MHz for the USB-part, the core runs slower.
Currently I have a projekt where I change from 4MHz to 16MHz by using the internal RC-oszillator, because I choose to interrupt the work 4000 times a second to monitor a serial signal... so, there is enough power...

4MHz up to 12MHz can be realized by cheap resonators instead of a quartz.