comparing CPU speeds

Am I correct that I cannot simply compare the rated speed of one computer to another? E.g., if one is 2.2 Ghz and another is 2.6, does that really tell me which is faster?

If that straight comparison is not valid, is there an easy way to at least get some idea about speed? Thanks.

 

You can only compare clock speed if it's in the same generation (you can only compare sandy bridge CPUs with themselves, Penryn, etc)

General rule is that each generation is faster than the one before it, except in some cases where the very low end will be slower than the very high end from before it. The p8700 I have in my laptop is supposedly faster than some of the lower end first Gen core i series CPUs, if you go off benchmarks.

If you want to see how fast something is and compare, just find benchmarks that are already done.

Edit: don't go trying to compare between laptop and desktop processors, and clockspeed between AMD and Intel don't line up too well either.

 

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

As Blaze said, if you compare processors with the same features and same number of cores within a generation, you can go by clock speeds, otherwise there is more to it.

For example, a core i7-2670qm vs a core i7-2760qm, the 2760qm will perform slightly faster. However, if you compare an i7-920xm to an i7-2630qm (both are at 2.0GHz on 4 cores), they have the same clock speeds, but the 2630qm is the newer generation of core i and will perform slightly faster.

The amount of data available varies per CPU so sometimes, there are a few less used CPU models where the results might not be entirely accurate, but for most CPUs (especially the Intel ones) that chart is accurate.