> I understand clockspeed is not something that can be directly compared, where MIPS might be more of an apples-to-apples comparison?
There's a joke saying that MIPS is acronym for "Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen".
It's just not a good measure of overall performance, because there's no guarantee that it translates to real world performance.
The only way to get good performance indicators is looking at benchmarks, and with an emphasis to benchmarks that resemble the workloads you expect to be running.
For ballpark estimates (of similar hardware), the power consumption is a good measure because the performance per watt figure is typically quite close for similar CPU architectures. It doesn't work for GPUs or CPUs of very different architectures, though.
For the comparisons you linked on the Surface, it will tell you how the CPU works on that particular form factor. But it's not a good estimate of the CPU power in general, because a small device like that is always going to be thermally constrained. You can't take this conclusion and apply it to another kind of laptop/desktop.
To go down the rabbit hole even further common benchmarks will run with one-off drivers to give the appearance of better performance.
I've seen vendors skip mem-zero, skew buffer sizes, overclock, disable thermal limits and all sorts of other shenanigans specifically targeted at gaming benchmarks.
Only real way to evaluate hardware is to run the exact loads(or simulacrum of them that's not disclosed to the vendor) which probably overkill for consumer hardware.
There's a joke saying that MIPS is acronym for "Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen".
It's just not a good measure of overall performance, because there's no guarantee that it translates to real world performance.
The only way to get good performance indicators is looking at benchmarks, and with an emphasis to benchmarks that resemble the workloads you expect to be running.
For ballpark estimates (of similar hardware), the power consumption is a good measure because the performance per watt figure is typically quite close for similar CPU architectures. It doesn't work for GPUs or CPUs of very different architectures, though.
For the comparisons you linked on the Surface, it will tell you how the CPU works on that particular form factor. But it's not a good estimate of the CPU power in general, because a small device like that is always going to be thermally constrained. You can't take this conclusion and apply it to another kind of laptop/desktop.