You laugh, but AMD did that in the mid-2000's with the Athlon XP series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_XP_processo... The numbers used to match their clock speed (ex. Athlon 1000 was 1000 MHz), but that changed with the XP models (ex. Athlon XP 2400+ was 2000 MHz).
IPC is a thing - clockspeed optimized architectures like Alpha and the Pentium 4 just didn't get as much done per cycle or had much harsher penalties when the pipeline stalled, even though they ticked faster.
Comparing the whole system against an actual task is the only way to really measure - everything else, including the clockspeed, is marketing.
The commonly used benchmarks are often pretty useless or irrelevant. Coming up with useful benchmarks is very hard and a pretty tragic thing about the supposedly irrelevant independent CPU benchmarking of the past 20 years is that CPUs are specifically designed to perform well at the silly benchmarks that are popular as well as at real world workloads where I think CPU manufacturers will have their own suites of more carefully designed more realistic more relevant benchmarks.
My claim is that (1) results on irrelevant benchmarks like SPEC do matter for CPU sales (probably not for big tech companies that operate their own datacentres – they’ll likely do their own testing – but likely for many ‘savvy’ consumers and also for companies that want to market their computers as having fast CPUs) and (2) the complicated world of benchmarks is handled very poorly by the people who tend to evaluate CPUs with them and publish their results.
There was an expression floating around for this naming scheme, but I can't remember what it was and don't find any good search results either for my candidates. "Processor/Pentium equivalent rating"?
This actually caused some problems with some Maxis/EA games at the time (like Sim City 4 or The Sims 2), because those games automatically tuned certain settings (mostly graphics settings, but somewhat annoyingly in The Sims also things like the maximum number of sims on one lot) depending on the power of your computer – mostly as measured by GPU model, amount of system and video RAM and CPU clock speed.
The problem was that the CPU clock speed levels categorising your system as high/mid/low performance were quite obviously based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even though at the time AMD actually had a market share of around 40 – 50 % for desktop computers. This meant that everybody with an AMD processor would find his/her performance and graphics settings mysteriously restricted. People using the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors had similar problems if they were still playing those games a few years later.
The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – things were controlled by a rules file in a plain text-based format, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.
This was also useful because the GPU detection had its own share of problems down the line – I still occasionally play Sim City 4, and for some reason or other on my current system the game doesn't correctly detect the amount of video RAM I have and therefore resorts to extremely restrictive fallback settings unless I manually override it, and AMD recycling graphics card model numbers also caused some confusion that had to be manually fixed.
I was a kid back then and we had mac labs at school, and those things were always slow or hanging. Maybe because they were imacs? During the second coming of Jobs era, Macs never really blew me away performance wise until the intel transition.
In my experience school computers have always managed to give a terrible impression - our school had Windows PCs and compared to my Mac at home they seemed terrible.
Comparing the whole system against an actual task is the only way to really measure - everything else, including the clockspeed, is marketing.