What the car industry can teach us about processors

While cycling to work the other day I saw an advert, on the side of a bus, for a car. As I live and work in central London I don't have much use for a car – driving to work could take hours and would cost a fortune. However, this ad caught my attention for its simplicity. In large letters it stated that 1.4 = 2.0, in reference to how a Volkswagen's 1.4 litre engine can produce as many horsepower as some of its competitor's 2.0 litre engines.

I have no idea if this is true, but it reminded me of how processor manufacturers have moved away from using clock speeds as the main selling point of their products. Once upon a time, Intel and AMD competed on making the fastest processor in MHz (and then GHz), but in recent years both have shied away from such figures, as the upper limits of silicon were approached, and more efficient multi-core processors became prevalent. Essentially the raw speed figure, like a car engine's capacity, had becomes more of a hindrance to marketers than a boon.

Now a consumer buying a new PC has to puzzle out whether an Intel Core i7-920 processor is more or less powerful than an AMD Phenom X2 920, with the actual numbers being entirely arbitrary. Even if the number of processing cores and clock speed are listed, you're still no closer to working out which is the more powerful chip.

What processors need is a figure like the BHP of cars – a standardised test that gives some indication of the raw processing power of the chip. Yes, some processors are better-designed for certain tasks than others, but surely this would be better than the current situation. I'm not talking about a real-world benchmark here, but something that gives a maximum theoretical performance figure in processes per second.

Given that both cars and processors are looking to be more efficient, the processor industry could also be more upfront about power consumption. Cars have to list their emissions for different types of driving. Wouldn't it be useful if processor manufacturers had to list their processor's power consumption for different kinds of tasks? Obviously this would have to include a motherboard and memory, and the manufacturers (like car makers) would tweak the figure as much as possible, but we'd end up with a more useful figure than the TDPs they currently list.

With us buying and using more computers, such information would be very handy for consumers. They could even come with ratings stickers like washing machines do. You could then get some idea of whether you're new PC is a Humvee or a Prius.