The MHz Wars of AI
There’s a pattern that repeats itself in the history of computing, and we might be living through its AI equivalent right now. In the early CPU era, the benchmark that mattered was clock speed. Intel vs. AMD fought on megahertz, then gigahertz. Marketing budgets were built around single numbers. Consumers learned to equate “faster clock = better chip.” It was clean, legible, and — for a while — true. Then it stopped being true. The gains from raw frequency hit physical and thermodynamic walls. The industry pivoted almost overnight: instead of faster cores, build more cores. Parallelism became the new religion. ...