Quote:
Originally Posted by serialk11r
This made me lol, MHz does not represent how many calculations it's doing. The difference is more like x 4 times the cores x 2 times the instructions per clock, not counting the more advanced instructions that the i7 has.
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Oh, it's much more than 2X the instructions. Hard to give a definitive answer, what with pipelining, long instructions, dependence on cache coherence, etc, but off the top of my head I'd say at least 10X per core.
Power comsumption is also pretty hard to get an exact number on. The 55W or whatever for the I7 is for all cores running at full throttle. Unlike the older processors, however, it does the electronic equivalent of pulse-and-glide, running a core when there are instructions to process, then going to a very low power idle state. So it's not unlikely that for the typical user, the I7 is actually using much less power over the course of a day.