[ksec]

>it's not like performance is linear with clock speed anyway

It doesn't scale well beyond certain clock speed, which is why extreme overclocking dont get you a linear performance boost. But at the ranges mobile SoC it is about as linear as it gets. i.e Clocking your SoC from 3Ghz to 3.3Ghz will get somewhere around ~10% improvement in most workload.

>and target clock speed is a huge part of the CPU

Target clock speed is a huge part of considering for power usage.

[mort96]

As you suggest, the performance benefits of increased clock speeds is highly workload specific. I agree. It's roughly linear for some workloads up to a point, and highly non-linear for other workloads (especially memory bandwidth constrained workloads, which is a relevancy case given that it's SoCs we compare, not stand-alone CPUs).

Yes, target clock speed is a big part in considering power usage, but also fab process, memory architecture, etc. Adjusting for clock speed makes no sense, though adjusting for power consumption might.