[ComputerGuru]

Kind of, but not exactly.

The amount you'd need to increase the clock of a RISC CPU to get similar performance to desktop CISC CPUs is a lot less than the 2.4GHz your currently using.

The shorter pipelines and simpler cycles means that you don't need to make the CPU crazy-fast to boost performance as much as you would with CISC. Intel has improved that starting with the Core CPUs, but it's still not as good as RISC design. The really deep pipeline in the P4 series was a killer - the cores were churning 3.6GHz and still not getting much work done. The "density of work" in a RISC cycle is (was) much higher than in CISC, and that really does help keep the power consumption down to a minimum.