T.,
Remember that any system-based performance metric will be open to rampant cheating, or the accusations of such.
I remember those days. What was it, Winmark, or winstones? The graphics card companies were the worst offenders.
One thing I like about MHz is the fact that you cannot easily fake it. Even a processor designed with high clock speed in mind (like the Pentium 4) has many challenges to meet, including process limitations and power dissipation. But when you buy a processor that runs at a given clock speed, you KNOW how fast that processor is running. Whether that actually translates to real performance is another question. But at least MHz is not as easily fudged as, say, QuantiSpeed (whose scale is only determined by the whims of marketeers).
In hard drives, you get their RPM, but that tells you about as much about the performance of the hard drive as MHz, and could theoretically be measured, and free from cheating. 1 GHz Itanium will beat the pants off 3 GHz P4 in SpecFp, but will lose at SpecInt by wide margin, and countless other examples could be found. MHz means something only to a person that is familiar with computer architecture, which is about 1% of the population (= geeks). It does not help 99% of the populations, unless they are comparing Brand A CPU, stepping X, at clock speed of Y MHz, vs. the very same brand, model number stepping of another CPU running at Y + 100 MHz.
Joe |
