Off The Clock -- Are The GHz Wars Over?

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When Rahul Sood selects processors these days, he's looking for "the closest thing to a 'flux capacitor' as we can get." What's interesting about the Voodoo PC frontman's line is that it appears that a reference to a popular movie from the 1980s has more relevance these days than the clock speed fixation that defined microprocessor shopping much more recently.

Make no mistake. Chip makers, system builders and hardware tweakers have always known that there is a whole lot more that goes into processor performance than just its clock. In the modern era of multi-core chips, GPUs, power concerns and platform integration, optimizing computer performance involves much, much more than slapping the fastest CPU you can find onto a motherboard and calling it a day.

The "megahertz myth" was famously scoffed at by Steve Jobs back in the early 2000s when Apple's PowerPC chips were having, well, their clocks cleaned by Intel's faster parts. Jobs' attitude was surely part marketing spin, but his premise -- that architectural advantages like the PowerPC's shorter pipelines can mean as much or more for performance as raw clock speed -- is now acknowledged as plain common sense by everybody, Intel included.

What's surprising, perhaps, is how quickly and totally this way of thinking about processors has taken hold.

Years ago, breaking the 1GHz barrier was greeted with the gearhead community's version of a ticker-tape parade. Nowadays, even as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices approach the halfway mark to 4GHz -- and baked-in overclocking capabilities and advanced cooling take chips' listed clock speeds hurtling past that barrier -- nobody really seems to care.

"Clock speed is the least important factor these days," said Sood, chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's Global Voodoo Business Unit. "What's important is how efficient the CPU is. In other words, lowest power, smallest footprint, lowest thermal requirements and best performance are what we look for when designing a new device."

Will a 4GHz off-the-shelf processor be big news when it arrives?

"Not really, at least not with my circle of friends," he said.

Intel's latest Core i5-670 processor runs with a base speed of 3.46GHz and can get a bump to 3.73GHz via the chip giant's Turbo Boost technology, which in certain conditions dials down processing on some cores and ratchets up the frequency of others on multi-core processors.

That's knocking on the door of 4GHz, but Nor-Tech's Todd Swank thinks the milestone won't much matter to the general public when it arrives.

"I think the 4GHz barrier is an exciting milestone to cross and will be followed by those of us in the industry, but I don't think it will generate nearly as much interest by the general population as when Intel and AMD both battled to surpass the 1Ghz mark," he said.

Swank, vice president of marketing at Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder Nor-Tech, said clock speed is just one of many considerations his customers have.

"It's amazing what's happened with clock speed. It used to be what everyone asked for when buying systems, but now there are just so many other variables to consider," he said. "Nowadays, when customers are giving us specifications, we're just as likely to see any of the following requests instead -- processor brand, model number, core count, onboard cache or features like Intel Turbo Boost."

The "relative weight" of core frequency "is lower than it was a few years ago" when it comes to evaluating processor performance, said Todd Garrigues, Intel's North America channel manager. The upshot for system builders, he said, is that with so much more to talk about with customers, there is much more opportunity to "add value by helping define what performance is" in their particular case.

"Is it getting multiple tasks done simultaneously, getting a single project like video editing done quickly, energy efficiency, etcetera? That is where the channel can step in and have a conversation with their customers, helping them make the best decisions possible," Garrigues said.

Next: More Talk About Clock Speed

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