Performance Rating - End of The MHz Race

End of The MHz Race

Between 2001 and 2003, Intel and AMD made few changes to the designs of their processors. Most performance increases were created by raising the processor's clock speed rather than improving the microprocessor's core. Around mid 2004, Intel encountered serious problems in increasing their Pentium 4's clock speed beyond 3.4 GHz because of the enormous amount of heat generated by the already hot Prescott core processor when working at higher clock speeds. In response, Intel started exploring ways to improve the performance of its microprocessors in ways other than raising the clock speeds of the processors such as increasing the sizes of the processors' caches, using a P6 microarchitecture descendant in Pentium M CPUs and beyond, and using multiple processing cores in its processors.

Because of the philosophy change, Intel now faces the challenge of making consumers compare its processors based on the PR system rather than raw clock speed, ironically a problem which Intel created itself.

Some analysts regard the PR scheme (and a raw MHz / GHz rating) as nothing more than a marketing tactic, rather than as a useful measure of CPU performance. Many professionals or interested amateurs now consult extensive benchmark tests to determine system performance on various applications.