CPU clock speed is not the big thing?

[Scotty]

Ya don't say?

Why Clock Speed Doesn?t Matter Much When Comparing Two Computer Processors

An interesting thought considering so many people not only don't understand what clock speed actually means, much less understand the necessity of having a full well-rounded system.  For instance, I would take a "mediocre" clock speed with high disk throughput and substantial amounts of memory over high clock speed, vice having all my computing bottleneck at the reads/writes of my disk as well as low memory.  It's actually amusing how at work I kept asking for more and more memory on my database servers, as every time I'd get an increase in max available memory, I'd just go and re-configure the database to suck up more memory, until the SA's came to me and said "Really?"  I tell ya what though, as large as my buffers and query cache is, that sucker runs lickidy split!

[ARTgames]

A good thing to point out. A Intel Pentium 4 3.80GHz is about 10x slower than a Intel Core i7-2630QM @ 2.00GHz in practical use. Its how much you can do in a clock cycle that matters when it comes to cpu performance. I'm leaving out the rest because it does get complex when you mix in other hardware. Its not easy for a normal person to pick out something and know what they are getting.

[T-Rok]

Very, very, interesting. I did not know this. Normally I'd add something like "So my blah blah blah is actually really good then?" But.. I have a craptop, its crap no matter what.

[krele]

As far as I know, cache is the judgmental part of any processor nowadays.