There was a time when processor speed meant everything. If you had a computer, you knew what kind of processor or CPU it had (Pentium ring any bells?). And you also knew the clock speed of the processor (256MHz?). Same story with the amount of hard drive space or the RAM available on your device.
Of late I personally have no longer cared about these numbers.
With mobile devices like smart phones and tablets sucking up all the media attention these days, it is not unusual to expect people talk about the processor on an iPhone vs on a Galaxy S2. With the latest iPad launch, people were questioning what kind of RAM it came with because Apple tends to be a bit coy about that kind of information.
I personally couldn't care less.
I have seen a number of devices from PCs to laptops to netbooks that promise all kinds of fancy specifications but severely disappoint when it comes to actually using the device. So whether a phone has a dual-core or quad-core processor makes no difference really. Is it a 1GHz CPU or 1.2GHz. Does it have 1GB or RAM or more? Who cares?
Can it play the video that I am downloading without breaking it up, without causing the images to lag the audio and without slowing my machine so much that I cannot even kill the application playing the video if I so please. If the system promises a 10 second boot time but then won't respond to my launch of an application for the next 5 minutes because it is busy doing stuff in the background, it is not working for me.
As long as the device does the functions it is meant for with the expected level of performance, I really do not care if they have a processor in there or little ants running the show. And I think that holds true for most people. However the manufacturers keep touting all kinds of meaningless technical jargon and specifications to convince the people that their product is indeed superior. If as a device manufacturer you can optimize your design such that you can achieve all levels of performance with the most basic hardware components, that's awesome. Because I only care about the end result.
So stop trying to confuse me with weird numbers and fancy names. Just tell me what works and what doesn't.
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