<< Face it, AMD will not drop the PR rating. Intel purposely engineered a processor that would scale highly in megahertz, so that they could push AMD into the low end, since prices are based on MHZ. Although AMD's Tbird 1.4 performed on par with the Willy 2.0, AMD had to price their part depending on Intel's 1.4. AMD lost tons of money, and they would go bankrupt if they did not impose such a rating. So far, the ratings have been very fair, even conservative, so I do not have a problem with it. >>
Ok, that's BS and you know it. The P7 design started in 1996. You honestly think Intel thought "gee, well AMD will release the K7 and beat us in the MHz in 1999, so we've gotta start on a MHz monster now?". It constantly amazes me how people think Intel can see the future. The P7 core was created because the engineers knew that eventually, the limitations on how fast signals can trasmit between logic gates will be limited no matter what you shrink the transisters to (for an example, take a look at the T-bred and how it overclocked in that overclockers.com.au article, 2.0 GHz stable with a Vapchill cooling, that's a .13 micron chip with copper interconnects and it's maximum yield was 11.11% higher than its .18 micron transister size predecessor). In contrast look at the Northwood and its scalability compared to the Willamette even with double the cache. 4.1 GHz (demonstrated at IDF) compared to 2.2ish GHz (I think that was the relatively high Willamette overclock with extreme cooling). There is a limit to how fast logic gates can switch on and off when in complicated stages.
And with the proper prediction algorithms, enough memory bandwidth and coding that provides enough instructions to process every second (or multiple threads of instructions), it could have just as high IPC as its predecessor (the P6 core). It's all about maximizing the gains while minimizing the losses. Marketing had nothing to do with the design (well, prolly something to do with it but it wasn't just for the MHz increase). The P7 core's early implementation and release in the form of the P4 on the other hand, I suspect was due to severe competition from AMD (I doubt the P7 core was even meant for sub-2GHz chips).