Wired News: Good Riddance, Gigahertz:

"When Intel said last week that it plans to stop using gigahertz figures to market its microprocessors, analysts said it was about time. A chip's clock speed is almost irrelevant in determining the overall performance of a computer.

But while Intel won praise for the move, industry analysts in the same breath said it's now even harder for consumers to shop for computers that fit their needs -- mainly because none of the chipmakers can agree on how to measure performance.

"What consumers really want is the number, but there really is no number" that quantifies a processor's overall performance, said Linley Gwennap, founder of the Linley Group, a research firm that tracks the microprocessor and networking industries."...

The cynic in me can't but help wonder what slow-clocking processors Intel will soon introduce to a mass market and so this de-empahsis is paving the way for that. After all AMD did it with QuantiSpeed(tm) [Googled] so what's source for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I often tell my students that choosing a processor based on clock-speed alone is like going into a car salesroom and choosing a car on the sole basis of how high the engine revs! Speaking of cars it does seem that Intel's proposal for naming future processors is exactly akin to the naming conventions that car manufacturers use! I've mentioned this before in several posts.