Intel drops megahertz myth

Intel plans to of its processors and will stop using clock speed as the primary means of distinguishing performance, The Wall Street Journal reports [paid subscription required]. The new numbering scheme will be more akin to what is found in the automobile industry, employing a variety of factors to assign a number to a chip, including architecture, frequency, speed, built-in memory, and forthcoming technologies. What was previously a Pentium M 2GHz could be known as a Pentium M 755, the article notes.

"[Intel's naming change shows that] megahertz is dead and they are admitting it," Pat Moorhead, an AMD vice president of corporate marketing, told the Journal. For more than two years, both Apple and AMD have been attacking the "megahertz myth," which, largely through marketing, has inaccurately led many consumers to believe that clock speed is the main determinant of performance. AMD, whose Athlon chips run at lower clock speeds but can match the performance of Intel chips running at higher clock speeds, replaced clock speed with a naming system that more or less reflected the chip's equivalent Pentium performance in megahertz.

Intel itself has also been a victim of the megahertz myth that it fueled: the company's high-end Xeon processor runs more than 1GHz slower than its fastest Pentium 4, while the Itanium 2, also a high-performance server-targeted processor, tops out at 1.5GHz.

by MacNN Staff