| your mother said: Seems like a few years ago PCs were caught up in the MHz/horsepower race, but that has now taken a back seat to efficient, silent, cool, cheap and most of all, "powerful enough" hardware. Is this the trend? Seems like consumer behavior is slowly favoring this approach (witnessing the sales of the "next-gen" consoles vs "last-gen's two Gamecubes duct-taped together" Wii) |
AMD and Intel were in a MHz war until they reached a sort of threshold. They realized, however, that increasing MHz is not the only way to increase CPU speed. AMD pioneered that concept with their XP line that estimated how fast they were compared to Intel's (1800, 2500, etc). However, the biggest increase in speed in many years for a CPU over the current leader was the Intel Core Duo. Sure, it was cooler and a lot more efficient than AMD's fastest (which was currently faster than Intel), but it was also 30% faster.
So, while the race is not completely MHz, it's still about speed and power. No one is going to buy a new processor if it's not faster.
