What is the benefit of having a higher processor speed ie Intel Core 2 Duo 2 93GHz vs Intel Core 2 Duo 2 66GHz?

Answer 1

Speed alone is not sufficient criteria to choose a system. You need to look at what type of work it is going to do. If you are doing big calculations, either in a large spreadsheet or in a large program that runs for a long time, then raw speed might drive you - although you would be well advised to also look at Local Bus speed, cache size and speed, and RAM size and speed. If your processing spends most of its time doing network or disk I/O and then does little bits of computation, speed would be interesting, but not the primary concern If your processing involves waiting for user input and then doing something simple, such as updating a text document, then speed is meaningless to you. However, processor manufacturers contantly build bigger and better processors, while the OS manufacturers constantly build bigger and better OSes that need bigger and better processors, so speed in all aspects comes back into play.