Intel Corp. will begin doing what
its competitor Advanced Micro Devices
Inc. did more than two years ago and stop referring to its chips by the clock speed of that
chip. Instead, Intel will name its chip kind of like car makers
like Mercedes-Benz or BMW. Just as Mercedes has S-class cars or BMW has
300-series cars, Intel is going to market its processors as 300-series,
500-series or 700-series processors. The higher the number within each
series, the better the chip, better in this case meaning full of more
features and not necessarily faster.
Clock speed, it seems to me, has always been overrated. I remember a Walt Mossberg from a couple of years
back in which he said that for most users, a computer with a
microprocessor clock speed of 500 megahertz was plenty enough to do
e-mail, some Web surfing and some word processing. I'd say he's still
right. Certainly, you don't need a chip running at 2 gigahertz to do
most computing tasks.
If you're buying a PC, I say skimp on the processor speed but spend as
much as you can on memory — try to get a a gigabyte or more — and
perhaps spend a little extra on a better video card so your screen will
draw images and multimedia stuff faster.
In fact, if it's multimedia that you're interested in, Apple's products seem to do a much
better job when it comes to content creation and content display.