Who Said MegaHertz Don't Matter Any More?

Apple has just begun shipments of their MacBook laptop using the Intel Core Duo cpu. Apple is offering three different clock speeds; 1.83, 2.0 and 2.16 GHz. I've been to the stores to see one and without exception, the customers, or prospective customers are speaking in terms of GHz, again. To me, it seems they are more comfortable doing that than measuring performance in terms of flops or throughput or any other metric.

Now AMD is pushing the Opteron 256 at 3.0 GHz and I hear that spoken of in terms of clock speed, as well. The chip companies have no one but themselves to blame for this, of course, but I do believe these last two releases have reversed all the changes in consumer thinking that they had labored so hard to foster. One slip of the lip, as it were.

I'm really interested in whether Intel, IBM and AMD will try to reinstate other metrics or simply give in and go back to clock speeds to differentiate their models in the pubic eye.

Jack