Quote Originally Posted by LeftEyeNine
Well, the new trend (not a brand new one ) in CPU manufacturing is increasing the cache levels such as L1 and L2. The frequency is not the all as it was before. After experiencing the significant benefits of higher cache levels in CPU's, the advertisements of CPUs extended another line about how many kbs/or Megs of cache the CPU has.

Therefore in case you want to try out a new CPU, look out for the cache levels as well
No. It hasn't got more or less important, it was always important along with clock speed. The trend in manufacturing is towards a finer lithography process.
Intel's flagship P4 was supposed to hit 10 Ghz although it petered out before even getting halfway, cache size was not the driving impetus in its design.

The concept that clock speed and cache cannot be used to compare across manufacturers seems to be difficult to grasp it seems.