[Plaumpholavup]

Clock speed is expressed in Hz, or cycles per second.

In layman's terms, the problem is not all cycles are created equal. Some chips do more per cycle than others.

There's other factors here. The Atom netbook has a lot more software overhead because it runs a full-featured OS rather than the crippled smartphone OS like on the iPad. This means that more cycles are stolen from the CPU to run the OS compared to the iPad.

A 2GHz Atom chip is definitely faster than the 1GHz A4 in the iPad, but it's not just because of the clock speed.

[chujwduperjadzi]

Because it's a lower power design with less functional units at slower clock speeds.

The 1GHz A4 CPU is rated at 2000 DMIPS (Dhrystone Million Instructions per Second - a synthetic integer computation benchmark). A 2GHz Atom is rated at 5000 DMIPs per core (Netbooks only have 1 core, usually)

[grudabor]

Thank you