Why AMD processor Speed in Ghz Does not equal Intels?

[DeusEx]

I knew this for ages, but i never really thought about WHY that is the case. Can someone shed some light on this topic?

[skier]

different architectures are more efficient for different things, as i'm sure you know, Phenom was an architecture that was released early just to fight intel, so they made a new architecture, Phenom II which was better across the board, and basically as time goes on, one company will make a chip that beats the other at a certain speed, lets say 2.6GHz Corei7 = 3GHz Phenom II X4 because speed can make up for most of architecture faults and cache differences (Corei7 has a ton more cache as well, so it's better for things that USE cache dominantly) that one chip has compared to another.

i mean, a 2.6GHz Corei7 doesn't equal a 2.6GHz Corei5 either. cache matters and so does the architecture

hope this somewhat answers your conceptual question

[DeusEx]

yeah you explained it very well. Makes sense. So it can vary not only from manufacturer but also across different lines within 1 manufacturer. Interesting.