Revolution Horsepower Revealed

Revo writes "IGN.com unveiled leaked specs for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console today. The system really is about twice as powerful as a GameCube and a far cry from the Xbox 360 and PS3. Of course, the focus is on the innovative controller and the affordable price."

Comments

Hardware isn't everything....

[GeorgeMcBay]

Of course, at the end of the day its all about the games and how fun they are, but even if you DO focus on the graphics, consider:

The original Xbox is, on paper, much more powerful than the GameCube and yet for my money (and I own many games on both of these systems), nothing on the original Xbox looks nearly as good as Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube.

I'm a lot more excited about the Revolution than either of the other next-gen systems (though I'll probably buy an Xbox360 when more good games come out for it)... in the meantime I'll keep trying to boost my online ranking in Tetris DS.

Re:Hardware isn't everything....

[danpsmith]

People constantly look at hardware specs to figure out what a good system will be anymore. It's meaningless. If you want examples just look in the past or the present. How about the PSP, has better graphics capabilities, support for movies, and all other kinds of stuff, how does it fare? Not as well as the DS for other reasons. A lot of the console has to do with the way it is designed and how games play on it, not exactly what they look like.

Re:Hardware isn't everything....

[harrkev]

A lot of the console has to do with the way it is designed and how games play on it, not exactly what they look like.

... and how much it costs.

Let's face facts here. There are a lot of gaming fans who work tech during the day and play games at night. They have money to burn. Or perhaps the children of such people.

But there is a LOT more people out there where the family is struggling to make ends meet. Christmas comes around, and junior wants a game system. What do the parents buy:

1) Game system which costs $400 or more and $60 games.
2) Game system which costs $200 and games are around $40.

In a case like this, specs don't matter. You buy what you can afford. For this reason and this reason alone, Revolution will sell well.

Re:Hardware isn't everything....

[a_nonamiss]

I know this article was featured on Slashdot, but for a really good explanation of why hardware specs aren't going to mean much anymore, I highly recommend reading Life After the Crash by David Wong

The essence of the article is that the direction that video games are moving in can't hold up much longer. Sure, Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox360 looks beautiful. You can see slightly better fog effects than previous generation consoles, and you can see beads of sweat dripping down the enemy soldiers' faces, but does this really make it a better game? For about 10 minutes your jaw hangs open at the realism of the game, but then you get used to it and realize it's exactly like every other first person shooter ever made. OK, instead of shooting demon possessed aliens from another dimension, you are shooting nazis, but does that really make the game any different once you adjust to your surroundings? Or, even more to the point, does it make it better than the last CoD title that you played?

The bottom line is that Nintendo is trying to do something that's actually different. They're betting the farm on the fact that gamers like myself are getting tired of shelling out more and more money for consoles that are less and less innovative. It's a gamble, and it's possible that they could be doing this too early, but they have proven in the past that they have a pretty good sense about the industry. I, for one, will stand in line to buy my Revolution, even if the fog effects aren't quite as good as the significantly more expensive Xbox360.

Ugh, this bullshit again.

[mcc]

Matt Casamassina hates Nintendo and takes every opportunity to talk about how weak and worthless their hardware is. Every three months for awhile now he's posted "leaked" specs about the Revolution. Every one of these "leak" stories takes care to talk about how much more powerful the XBox 1 is than the Revolution. In all cases the source is "sources".

Frankly I think it's most likely the Revolution will be the weakest of the three next gen consoles, but I'll believe this when I see , and after the rabid and rapidly decaying lack of journalistic integrity shown by Matt Casamassina in the last couple of years, I personally refuse to believe anything I read on revolution.ign.com at all.

You can feel free to believe what you want of course.

Re:Ugh, this bullshit again.

[zealot]

I agree. The "performance" number he's quoting are complete crap.

"IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU was clocked at 733MHz. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz."

and

"Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the GPU on the original Xbox was clocked at 233MHz."

and

"Clearly, numbers don't mean everything, but on paper Revolution's CPU falls performance-wise somewhere well beyond GameCube and just shy of the original Xbox."

THE MAJORITY OF HIS COMPARISON IS BASED ON CLOCK SPEED. Yet he's comparing completely different architectures. Gamecube had an IBM flipper chip (some sort of Power-based core), Xbox had an x86, X360 has 3 simplified Power-based cores running at high clock speeds. Gamecube had an ATI graphics, XBox had NVIDIA graphics. You can't just throw random MHz numbers out there and draw any type of conclusion. Ok, I suppose there's one type: an invalid one.

Re:Ugh, this bullshit again.

[G-funk]

They're complete crap because the xbox is only a gnat's dick faster than the cube (the difference is just about nil if you compare the two of them to the PS2). It can't be both twice as powerful as the cube and almost as powerful as an xbox.

Re:They'll get a significant portion of the market

[Justin205]

They aren't aimed 'at' younger kids... They're aimed at casual gamers, more. They're good fun, and many can be played from anyone between about 5 years old and someone who's near-dead.

Just because a game gets an "E" rating doesn't mean people over 13 can't play it...

Re:What is this susposed to imply?

[NoTheory]

I don't think there's any implying taking place. The article clearly states that Nintendo isn't trying to battle Sony and Microsoft on raw speed or capacity. They believe that machines are powerful enough already that they don't have to push that particular envelope. They're concentrating on other stuff, controllers, price, making it easy for Cube developers to transition to the revolution.

It's all in the article. This article is interesting because you can see exactly how the revolution is going to match up in terms of power. The fact that you're non-plussed says more about you than nintendo, or this article. It's just saying what's been said all along. we've just got numbers now.

And for the record, i'm nearing 27, and i'm really interested in seeing what's gonna happen on the revolution. :)

Better games are the real important issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

nintendo has alyways made sure that their games are better.

i think it will hold true to this console. i still like pokemon and zelda. call me childish all you will, but they were good games, regardless of the system it was run on.

Seriously, i look at the xbox 360 games, and theres nothing there that excites me. just all this stupid crap that tries to emulate real life. thats not why i play video games, i play them to excape from real life. at least nintendo has an art style.

Innovation

[xamomike]

I welcome Nintendo's new console, it's not just about the fine detail or how many poly's the gpu can process per second... it's about game innovation, and Nintendo has always had well branded games that kids like. I've been impressed with some of the games on the Gamecube, even if it is slower than hell by spec. The fact is they have good selection of games kids love to play, and even some of us older folks. I currently own an XBox 360, PS2, and a Gamecube. My kids play the gamecube more than the others because they enjoy the games more.

Re:What is this susposed to imply?

[Panaphonix]

I don't think a weird controller is going to awe enough people to their platform.
It might. Wasn't it weird when they came out with a touchscreen on the DS? That's selling huge (fastest ever to reach 5 million in Japan), and creating entirely new genres, including Nintendogs, which sold a quarter-million in the first week, and the new Brain Age game which has done incredibly well with people who have never played a video game in their life.

I suppose Nintendo is trying to either fill or a niche market or impress a disappointed crowd.
They made the most money in the last console wars. This time around, Nintendo might be mass-market while Sony and MS are forced into the comparatively "niche" hardcore gamer market.

Quality technical writing.

[ameoba]

I love the author's impliciaction that The revolution's 729MHz PPC is somehow going to be slower than the 733MHz Celeron that runs the original XBox (and the silent implication that the 3-way 3.2GHz chip in the 360 is meaninffully comparable to either of these on clock-speed alone) .

We're dealing with a real technical powerhouse here and he's giving us some insighful hardware analysis.

Re:Price Point

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you directly compare the horespower. All that's been released is the clockspeed of the processors.

As we all know, from the big AMD vs Intel war, clockspeed isn't everything. Also keep in mind, that IBM usually develops PPC chips - and PPC chips generally are faster per clock speed than PC chips.

Also keep in mind that the revolution won't need to fill a 1024i or whatever resolution - just a standard dvd resolution. So it doesn't need as much power to do the same quality of graphics (in terms of what it's rendering, not what resolution it's rendering at).

My prediction? The step between platform graphics is going to be similar to how the dreamcast fared last time around - ie, somewhere between the two generations of graphics. But also keep in mind that graphics aren't all the revolution is bringing to the table, meaning it probably won't fare the same as the dreamcast did.

Pixels to push

[Adelph]

Nintendo has made clear their intent _not_ to support hi-def formats on the Revolution, whereas MS and Sony are heavily marketing the 1080i capabilities of their respective consoles. One theory for the viability of this relatively small increase in graphics power: with much fewer pixels to push, the Revolution's hardware will be able to produce framerates similar to what the Xbox360 and PS3 can do in hi-def. And on a non-HDTV, a game on all three consoles may end up looking the same.

The same argument...

[straterpatrick]

This is exactly the same story that came out when DS and PSP specs were announced. PSP is so much more powerful and DS is for kids, etc... But look at how well the DS is doing. Not that it is blowing away the competition but I don't think anyone expects the Revolution to "beat" 360/PS3. Nintendo just needs to recover from Gamecube's failure and grow it's user base. If Revolution is anything like the DS then I think they will do quite well.

Re:What is this susposed to imply?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I have up modding this topic to point something out.

Nintendo do something Sony and Microsoft don't get. You'll shit yourself when you ehar what it is.. because it's like EARTH SHAKINGLY AMAZING. Nintendo make fun games, games you can pick up and just play, enjoy them and be done with them. They don't need Mario to be super realistic, or 12 hours of FMV per 3 minutes of gameplay. They just make good games.

If you can't see this or think that's "lame". I suggest you stop playing games and start watching films. Fun comes before the latest greatest graphics engine. If you'd look beyond your biast to maybe try Mario kart or something like billy hatcher you may enjoy something.

I'd also like to point out RE:make, RE0, RE4 and quite a few other games on the cube arn't aimed at children. The cube just happens to be a good console which is afordable and so suitable for games aimed at the new and old. Maybe you should check the PS2 release list and see the 5 million children's games released each year for the thing.

Asking the wrong question

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Why would you care about hardware stats? Do they guarantee "better games"?

News, MS and Sony fanbois...the answer is "no". Better games come out of better design which are sensitive to the kinds of passtimes people want to pursue.

But, um, Nintendo fanbois? There's another side to that. Hardware horsepower makes it far easier to build games with a wider scope for play. Remember the Halo grenade hacks? Those were damned fun, and, from talking to the dev manager on the product, I can assure you that nobody expected them or planned for them. They made heavy use of the fact that there was physics in the game -- and that depended on the hardware horsepower of the XBox.

So game design isn't

Re:Asking the wrong question

[be-fan]

There are lots of classes of games for which graphics are important. Take for example sports games which are very popular in the US. Graphics are critical for such games to reproduce the realism of a real sports event. Since the actual game rules are fixed by the sport, there isn't a whole lot of room to innovate in the gameplay department, so going in the realism direction is the best option.

Also consider the genre of first-person shooters (which are also popular in the US). Graphics are important not just for creating atmosphere, but HD graphics are going to be great for multiplayer maps (you can see farther with more detail). CPU power is going to be critical to feed the advanced physics and AI engines that modern games are sporting. Take a game like F.E.A.R, whose great animation, physics, and AI really add to the experience, and shoe-horn it into the revolution, and you lose a lot of the specialness of the game.

Or consider RPGs. Console RPGs depend on a great degree on the ability to tell a story. Good graphics and animation are critical in conveying the epic feel of an interactive story. I mean, what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?

It seems very clear to me that the Revolution is destined to be another Gamecube: basically, a console only good for playing Nintendo's first-party titles. Sure, most of those are very good games, but how much is really in that library for a sports, RPG, or FPS fanatic? Because between the tastes of Japan and the United States, these are the genres that are really important to gamers. Of course, you could argue that Nintendo is aiming at a completely different market with the Revolution (eg: "The Sims" market), which could very well be true, but in that case, Nintendo isn't really competing in the same sphere as Microsoft and Sony.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[lordpud]

>I mean, what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?
Umm... a really good book?

Re:Price Point

[justchris]

Except the Xbox doesn't have comparable specs. The Xbox has comparable specs to the gamecube, and likely would be heavily inferior to the gamecube if the GC's CPU was fast enough to handle the GPU's output.

And considering that at least one controller will come with the system, and the development cost alone of that technology, your conclusion is fallacious.

Nintendo's primary demographic is ....

[TheAxeMaster]

It seems to me that Nintendo is targeting anyone who isn't a "gamer." And by that, I mean people that don't care about graphics, don't care about shooting people, don't care about sports simulations or any other simulation, etc. These people are kids and adults alike. They're people that want to play games for the fun of it, games you can get in and out of, not games you can make a lifestyle from. They don't care if they're the best at Game X, they just like to play it. Its fun and its different. These games don't need to run at 1080p because it doesn't make a difference.
 
Do I think it will be the best selling console in the US? No. But when you can't buy a goddamn DS in japan except USED and for a higher price than retail, I'd say they're doing something right, at least where they are...

Re:GameCube controller == Dual Shock

[Manchot]

If not the standard Gamecube controller, what about the Wavebird (wireless) controller? It was the industry's first reliable wireless controller.

Revolution the most interesting development yet

[suv4x4]

First of all: those numbers of course don't make sense, what's next, comparing CPU weights and color?
Anyways.

Will Revolution be as powerful as XBOX360 and PS3, no, it can't handle highdef and this should tell a lot.

Thing is, once you remove high-def support, you suddenly have a lot horsepower left to render great imagery on a 480p / 480i device. So we can't say that Revolution games will look worse than XBOX360 games on an NTSC/PAL TV which most people have out there.

But scrap even that.

Do you think Nintendo accidentally missed the fact their console is slower? And what means this for a game anyway? Does it mean worse gameplay or experience? Nintendo apparently is confident in their vision, enough so not to get into the dick length comparison game Sony and Microsoft are doing with their machine specs.

I mean, they support NES/SNES/Genesis titles for Christ's sake, were those games crappy? They look GREAT on a TV screen, and some titles have gameplay unparalled in modern titles.

Also it has enough power and innovation for great new content, what could a gamer want? Value and entertainment or silly spec numbers?

Nope, You ARE a Gamer!

[Cadallin]

That's the difference! While the market has migrated away from real gamers, we're still here. That's what Nintendo is aiming squarely at this generation. Nintendo appeals to two groups: Family friendly (where the "kiddie" accusation comes from, but Mario Kart is still a blast, and so is Pikmin) and the real old school gamers who never left, i.e. the people who played Gradius, and Contra, and Castlevania on the original Nintendo.

Gaming has temporarily (yes, Temporarily!) gone mainstream, just as it did in the early 1980's. This too, shall pass, Sony and Microsoft will fall, but Nintendo will remain, cranking out profitable quarter after profitable quarter. The mainstream audience demands tits and ultraviolence, so that's what Sony and Microsoft deliver, but the mainstream is fickle, and doesn't really give a damn about any one type of entertainment fundamentally. This era is going to come crashing down just like the Atari 2600, and Nintendo will be there, AGAIN, to pick up the pieces and move on.

Re:Nope, You ARE a Gamer!

[Cadallin]

It's naive to claim the video game industry wasn't dead because of the 8-bit personal computers like the Commodore 64. The C64 never had the market punch the 2600 had, and no actual software for the C64 had sales numbers like the 2600 games in during the '80-'83 period. The market positively wilted from million selling titles on the 2600, to companies being thankful for shipping 10,000 units on the C64 and Apple II. If you want to try and force it to be seen that way.

I think it is more accurate to describe the situation as the Video game market crashed so hard, the then miniscule, but still growing, Personal Computer market came to dominate for a short period of time. After all, the Personal Computer market goes back even further than the home PONG machines that predated the 2600.

Illustrates Nintendo's point.

[earthbound kid]

Nintendo has repeatedly said that they weren't going to release the specs to their next console, because it's irrelevant and misleading. IGN just proved their point. Everyone who knows anything about CPUs knows that PPC chips perform better on a per-megahertz basis than x86 chips, yet IGN acts like Xbox's higher clockrate means it was necessarily better than the Gamecube. (Maybe, maybe not, but the MHz tells you exactly nothing about the question.) Similarly, he's comparing the Xbox 360 to the Revolution without noting that they have completely different architectures. It's like saying, "this Japanese guy's phallus is 10cm and this American guy's is only 6", therefore, 10 being larger than 6, the Japanese are more fun in the sack for the ladies."

This article is completely misleading, and further illustrates why Nintendo didn't care to publish their specs. None of these specs have anything to do with whether the Revolution is fun or looks good. For that, we have to wait until E3 when Nintendo shows off the console to the public. Until then, it's all just meaningless dick measuring.

Re:Price Point

[k_187]

that and having 7000 games to play doesn't mean much if only 150 of them are worth playing

Re:What is this susposed to imply?

[localman]

You know, that's an interesting point that I hadn't thought of but it's obvious in hindsight. I'm a 32 year old Nintendo fan with disposable income. I'm a lot more interested in playing youthful games like Mario and Zelda that have great design than GTA and other "mature" games that are actually aimed at kids who are still thrilled by random violence and high polygon counts. No offense intended, I was one of those kids 16 years ago. In fact I even coded a couple ultra-violent games on my C64 back then. No polygons, though :)

But yeah, people like me are probably a better market. And I could care less what kind of horsepower it has. As long as it has good games I'm in. Nintendo must understand this at some level.

Cheers.

DS vs. PSP

[Belgand]

This argument, while still speculation at this point since the Revolution hasn't been released, seems to mirror the current predicament of the DS and the PSP.

On paper the PSP is vastly more powerful. It has a 333MHz CPU with 32 MBs of main memory. The DS, in comparison, has an ARM 9 running at 67 MHz and an ARM 7 running at 33 MHz. On the RAM side it has 4 MBs of system memory as well as 32K of processor RAM for both ARM 7 and ARM 9, and 656K of VRAM. This should totally blow the DS out of the water and admittedly the PSP looks very, very nice.

Yet, the DS is well on it's way to making the PSP little more than a portable video player that offers a few games. While there are endless areas of speculation (e.g. the much higher cost of the PSP, the unique controls of the DS) I feel it really comes down to the games. Quite simply the DS has much, much better games and a pretty good library of them. The PSP has... uh... Lumines, GTA:LCS, Mega Man Powered Up and I've heard good things about Daxter. Even among the games available most of them haven't really seemed to inspire people to talk about them nearly as much as the DS's library.

Sure a few games work because they use the unique aspects of the DS (e.g. Kirby: Canvas Curse, Nintendogs) but the vast majority don't. A few (e.g. Castlevania, Phoenix Wright) aren't even first-party titles... though admittedly almost all of the top titles are.

It's just that when it comes down to it the system that people tend to prefer is the one with better games. Not flashier graphics, not more raw power on paper. I can't say that sales figures will necessarily back this up because, honestly, Sony and Microsoft both have their fans and a good enough stranglehold on the market at this point that they aren't likely to be upset very easily. But in the end this battle of specs over games has already more or less been won and the victor clearly seems to be the less-powerful, but more enjoyable machine from Nintendo.

Funny, isn't it?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I always found the Slashdot attitude about graphics to be strange - more of a reaction against the common wisdom than anything really thought out. Every time a new NVIDIA card comes out, there are 200 comments about how it's unnecessary. About how the old card was just fine.

Let me say this - graphics are important. Of course gameplay is more important, but there's no reason that we can't have both. I want a system that can push an HDTV. I want a system that can push loads of special effects and maintain a constant 60fps. I want more realistic characters, larger environments, and smarter AI.

The Gamecube is a fine system. I one one myself. When the Revolution ships, I'll probably get one - I like the idea of playing 20 years of games on a system. I think that the controller will be cool, and while I'm not sure if it will be practical, I'm willing to bet taht the Big-N will come up with some cool applications. But I do not for a second believe that the Revolution is a replacement for the XBOX 360 or the PS3. I'm glad that Microsoft and Sony are pushing graphics forward. And I'm disappointed that Nintendo isn't doing the same. Having an affordable system is important, but why is the Revolution limited to 83MB of memory? How much does 256M of DRAM really cost? And why can't it output at least 480p? Even my Gamecube could output 480p.

It's looking more and more like the Revolution is just an updated Gamecube. But by the time the Revolution ships, the 'Cube will be more than 5 years old. Can't Nintendo do a little better?

Still the only 'next gen' ill buy

[otterpop378]

A few reasons why I don't give a crap about the specs:
Pikmin
Monkey Ball
Legend of Zelda
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Just because the graphics aren't the most optomized to play the latest disposable first-person-shooter, doesn't mean it's inferior.

..Additionally.

[catwh0re]

Also I might add to this that brief information they have given here is enough to ascertain that they are able to create just about any game they like on this hardware. What they won't be able to do is lazily program a game which has excessive use of polygons(even for background objects) and use excessive detail in pointless textures (no one really looks at grass and tree bark that much.)

This may sound a little bit zealotly but I back up nintendo's formal commentary that we've(as consumers) have sufficient hardware for quite a while to produce stunning looking, great playing games.

After all when something gets too detailed, you can just pre-render the object onto a more primitive figure (3d users are already familiar with this technique called amongst other titles "surface sampling"). Additionally there are newer 3d engines that use depth based calculations to determine how heavy a polygon should be I.e close up models are polygon rich, further models are not.

With the algorithm advancements we've had in the 3D sector, it's no surprise that the raw performance of the nintendo console hasn't increased significantly.

One final point to make is that nintendo games are usually highly stylised. So for the majority of their bread & butter titles programmers+designers are not seeking photo realism.

Re:Analog switchoff, bowl games, and bait and swit

[Hitto]

I will kill your argument with only one proposition : You start paying the novelty tax, I'll root for you and call you the coolest kid on the block, and I'll buy a HDTV when it's dirt cheap.

We geeks are tech-savvy, not drug addicts. HDTV can wait.

Re:Price Point

[LnxAddct]

I know you were joking around, but some people will not understand that. The 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC in the Sun T2000 has recently set a few world records for performance, outperforming 4 dual core Xeons. It is a multi-cored chip, but that is only one reason why it performs so well. Anyone who has taken any hardware architecutre course quickly learns that clock speed is just about meaningless, in fact if you only increase clock speed and don't change anything else, you'll typically see higher percentages of your processing time being used to handle hazards and other nonsense. Another example is the Pentium M, which often runs at under half the clock cycle of the P4, but leaves the P4 in its dust for just about every benchmark. A high clock cycle amounts to nothing but outrageous amounts of heat and energy when you can be processing the data faster and more efficiently as Intel has learned in recent years. The Mhz myth needs to end.

What's even better for Nintendo is that these chips are custom built for Nintendo's needs, and a chip designed for a purpose always performs very well against generic processors (even if the generic processor is supposed to be several times faster). I mean noone would expect their P4 to match up against any modern Nvidia or ATI GPU for graphics performance, thats just how it is. Nintendo also knows how to squeeze performance out of its hardware (i.e. the often cited Resident Evil 4, if I can get graphics twice as good as that on this new console, then really Sony and Microsoft will have nothing to stand on). The cell processor doesn't even have a good compiler yet, and its developers don't know how to effectively use its resources, same thing goes for the XBox (but not to as bad of an extent). By the time the XBox and PS3 are being effectively used, it'll be time for the 4th gen consoles. I am betting that Revolution will be capable of graphics on par if not better than PS3's release titles.

And as a final point, this is only a dev box we are talking about and not final production specs, so the whole argument is pointless.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Analog switchoff, bowl games, and bait and swit

[Zigg]

Nintendo doesn't take risks on things that don't fundamentally enhance gameplay.

DS and Revolution do this. HD does not.

Re:2X?!

[Guppy06]

You are likely to be eaten by a koopa.

What are you smoking?

[cybrthng]

Ghost Recon? Oblivion? Kameo?

I'm not sure about the life you live but i sure as hell don't get to drive tanks, fight funny creatures and morph into different characters and go on epic journeys in lush forrests and such.

You need to rethink hardware corporation methods

[Zigmar]

I'm sorry,you are completely wrong. Those number (clock speed) can't be compared _at_all_ on processors with different architectures. For example one CPU can perform only one simple operation during the CPU cycle and need to fetch each instruction from RAM, while other may perform dozen operations of different pipes and stages, take instruction from light-speed fast cache and predict most of the branches. That's just example, but it not far from the truth. CPU clock speed all alone can tell you _nothing_ about performance of the system. Even if you take into account the architecture, clock speed, RAM speed, main board and buses architecture, etc. you can tell nothing, because in order to compare, you have to run real benchmarks, because some architectures outperform others easily on some tasks, and lose on others.