How Many Miles per Gallon Does Your CPU Get?

We might all be plenty happy to ogle over the next gigahertz revolution, but CNet recently pointed out that rating processor performance alone is becoming a useless measure. We can make the processors fast, the quesiton is, can we do it without burning through the mother board (and the electric bill).

Unfortunately, the MPG of a CPU (theoretically measured in performance per watt) is not a simple thing to calculate. The real meaning of the hertz, meaning processes per second, is now pretty much ignored. There's no perfect way to measure the performance of a CPU, and there is really no way at all to accurately measure performance per watt.