Topic: Do GHz mean as much any more?

[micah]

Over the years, as technology changes and I've stopped paying attention, I've become pretty ignorant about a lot of hardware and how it works.

my first pentium comptuer had a 100MHz process that I eventually got upgraded to 133MHz when the mother board had a problem under warranty and Gateway 2000 sent me a new board.  That was like 14 years ago.  Over time, I've always used that processor speed as a gauge of how good a computer's specs were.  Eventually I had a 1GHz processor then a 2GHz... but now Im noticing that "high powered" machines, like my macbook pro is 2.5GHz but you can buy a 3.4GHz processor in a new desktop machine for like $500.  So is a 1.6Ghz macbook air for $1,500 only half as fast as $600 Dell at 3.4?  I'm guessing probably not, so what makes the difference?

[KnuckleBuckett]

These days it is more about architecture than speed alone.  How many cores (to the extent that your software can utilize them) how efficient the engineering is internal to the chip.  Which parts of the system are on chip and further which are actually on the die.  Add in virtual threading (which is a nice way to use wasted overhead - again dependent upon your software) and it can get a bit nuts.  Finally some CPUs actually self overclock within a defined thermal envelope when the need for more CPU is detected.

We have quad core Intel chips generally outperforming hex core AMD chips in the $200 range.  That said within narrow limits the AMD can surpass the Intel chip in various instances.

It really comes down to determining what you want your CPU to do, what your applications (now and near future) are capable of taking advantage of and your budget.

To a lesser extent the same can be said for graphics cards. 

I can help you decide if you need help, and there is lots of great articles out there that give great benchmark comparisons.