Nope, the IPC was hugely different in the MHZ wars days.
Pentium III had 20% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Northwood; AMD K8 (Athlon 64) had 35% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Prescott.
Same in the RISC vs CISC days: Pentium had 33% higher IPC than the original PowerPC 601. Late generation RISCs like Alpha were a completely different beast again, with the DEC Alpha 21264 (EV6) having 25% higher IPC than Pentium III.
It was never obvious back then, and it was also never obvious since then.
IPC keeps rising among different architectures. A couple years ago Apple overtook Intel, and ARM did as well.
Yeah it never worked across architectures, but up until the P4 came out it was quite reliable within a family.
The P4 is what killed the MHz Wars in my memory. It was clear it couldn’t keep clicking up and it’s poor performance relative to existing chips at similar clock speeds (as you noted) meant the game was over.
Pentium III had 20% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Northwood; AMD K8 (Athlon 64) had 35% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Prescott.
Same in the RISC vs CISC days: Pentium had 33% higher IPC than the original PowerPC 601. Late generation RISCs like Alpha were a completely different beast again, with the DEC Alpha 21264 (EV6) having 25% higher IPC than Pentium III.
It was never obvious back then, and it was also never obvious since then.
IPC keeps rising among different architectures. A couple years ago Apple overtook Intel, and ARM did as well.