I agree! There's a lot more to it than MHz! At the time, we also didn't have any other figures, like cache size, any power consumption/TDP figures, memory speed/bandwidth, any base or turbo clocks.
I felt like it was probably one of the first possible custom cores I'd seen, something specifically built for Chromebooks or Pixel or whatever the product was. That probably this part was not listed on Intel ark. But it was super distressing none-the-less: I had been denied any understanding what-so-ever of what kind of core was going to be within. There's more than MHz, yes, but also not knowing process (nm), not knowing wattage, not knowing caches... Google was asking me for something unprecedented: to spent ~$1000 on a system for which I had no understanding at all of expected performance.
It felt like a dark dark dark dark day. After decades of in depth analysis & review of every cache change, every TLB tweak, after endless in depth review of cores, we'd entered a bold new era. Where none of of what you really were buying was regarded as consumer-pertinent.
There's some "bright" spots but they are somewhat obfuscated. Lenovo's M75q gen2 with AMD 4750GE was an amazing package, regularly on sale for a very reasonable price with amazing performance[1]. But alas, it's rare that the genuine performance is known, is what is for sale. We have become a post-consumer market. The invisible hand operates at a post-consumer level, selling us on other, more illusory factors than capability. Truth vanishes. And yes, as this article says, many people just don't need to play the game in the first place, but still, the becoming invisible, the vanishing of actual competition is most dismaying.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m75q-gen2-ti...