Okay, we know we've mentioned this before, but it's all starting to come into focus now, so we think it bears a second look. Take a deep breath, concentrate, and try not to go wandering off in boredom when we bring up the sordid issue of... the Megahertz Myth. (Insert jarring and dramatic chord here.) We're sure by now that you're sick to death of people regarding processor clock speed as the ultimate measure of performance, and possibly even sicker of people complaining about people regarding processor clock speed as the ultimate measure of performance. What can we say? Don't blame us-- we didn't make this world; we just live in it.

Actually, if you're looking for someone to blame for this sorry state of affairs, go spit in the coffee over at Intel; those people are the ones who perpetuated the "MHz = Speed" fallacy for all these years by cranking out chips with ever-faster clock speeds at any cost. But as we mentioned before, Chipzilla may well be watching that strategy jump up and bite it in the backside cache. True, the company just shipped a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4, but how exactly is it going to explain to people that its new 64-bit Itanium processor is a zippy little powerhouse-- when it only runs at 800 MHz? After all these years of programming the plebs to think that clock speed is everything, it's deliciously ironic that the company is now forced to try to undo its years upon years of mass brainwashing.

How, you ask? Well, it's starting off slowly, but faithful viewer Victor Agreda, Jr. pointed out an eWEEK article which notes that, despite the fact that the company demoed a P4 running at the ridiculously high frequency of 3.5 GHz, the general manager of the Intel Architecture Group backpedalled by insisting that "computer users will soon care less about processor speed and more about overall performance." (Hmmm, where have we heard that before?) Intel's new focus, apparently, is "moving beyond gigahertz" to pay attention to other suddenly-vitally-important aspects of the computing experience like "reliability, style, ease of use, and power savings." Truly, this guy is a visionary. If only some other company had been working on all those factors for years already, we might have had, say, gorgeous-looking titanium laptops with five-hour batteries and the world's most user-friendly operating system by now. Oh, well.

And what about AMD, who was once neck-and-neck with Intel in the race to break the 1 GHz barrier, but now lags its biggest competitor by some 500 MHz or so? Not long ago, we mentioned that the company would probably have to take a stab at fighting the "Megahertz Myth" itself. Well, as kindly pointed out by faithful viewer The M@d H@tter, AMD is pouting because Intel, it alleges, is "devaluing the meaning of megahertz." According to another eWEEK article, AMD is finally so fed up with the Pentium 4 and its "faster clock speed, slower performance" strategy that it is actually boycotting clock speed altogether. That's right; the company's newest chips won't actually be labeled with a clock speed at all, and in fact, now we're hearing that computer manufacturers using AMD processors will actually be forbidden to market them based on clock speed. Instead, AMD plans to label its chips with a number representing "the number of instructions per clock times the frequency." That oughta play real well in Peoria, right?

So what does all this mean for Apple? Potentially great things. Since Intel got us all into this whole clock speed mess in the first place, its massively effective marketing team may well be able to dig us back out-- particularly if AMD is helping. Imagine if there were some universally acknowledged rating of a computer system's overall performance, and that was the number that got advertised in the Sunday circulars; suddenly Macs wouldn't be "only at 867 MHz" anymore. Okay, so it's not too likely... but we can dream, can't we?