Well.. 2.26 vs 2.93... 670mhz difference... It was only just around a decade ago when proplr were working on Pentium III machines with a ~600mhz clock rate.
When it comes to opening apps and navigating menus, you're really not going to tell the difference. A faster processor will certainly make these things faster, but it's fractions of a second difference. And seriously, who measures performance based on opening an app or a menu. You want to look at hard number crunching instead.
Lets take it from a simple empirical view in a "perfect" scenario...
2.26 billion clock cycles vs 2.93 billion clock cycles.... 670 million clock cycle difference.
Lets say you're trying to ray-trace an image (easiest scenario i can think of right now) which means you're going from pixel to object, rather than object to pixel. Let's say it's fairly image at 1680x1024 image - it has 1720320 pixels. Now lets say rendering each pixel on average involves 300 operations in the program - it's not too complex. Each operation on average takes 10 clock cycles.
10x300x1720320 = 5160960000 clock cycles = ~5.16billion clock cycles.
What does this mean? Well, simply, on a 2.26Ghz machine, it would take 2.28 seconds to render, and 1.76 seconds to render on a 2.93Ghz machine.
This is really a simplistic way of looking at it in a "perfect" scenario - i.e. no memory bottlenecks and interference from other apps - also running in a non-threaded mode. But the idea applies to anything else really.
And while the example is small, and increase in the clock cycles in the example will show an (unsurprisingly) linear increase in the difference between the two processors.
The comparison also stands when comparing 3.33Ghz and 2.26Ghz in non-threaded applications. But its a different story with threaded stuff. An 8-core 2.26Ghz machine will be faster than a Quad-core 3.33Ghz machine
if all cores are being utilised either by the program you're using or the sheer amount of individual applications you're using concurrently (this of which would require some serious multitasking
).
