| > Why? I’m not the GP, but I agree with the sentiment. Clock speed alone is a spectacularly bad metric to use for a summary result regarding relative performance of different CPUs. If one wants to assess performance on a workload of integer addition/subtraction with a linear chain of data dependencies on a working set that fits in the L1, then sure, clock speed will correlate strongly with performance (in practically every metric other than maybe power). On the other hand the performance of a lot of real-world workloads will be influenced by things like the number of execution units per core, the types of operations they perform, the throughput of various instructions, the specifics of the front end (e.g. assuming x86/CISC, the types of uops; the size of the BTB; the branch-prediction algorithm), the size of the various caches (TLBs in addition to I$ and D$), the specifics of the coherency protocol, the memory bandwidth, etc. All that to say that CPUs should be compared by benchmark results, not blind comparisons of clock speed, and so to quote clock speed in a summary might lead one to question the rest of the results. |