But your correspondent is not sure that more raw speed will solve the glacial loading problem.

ECONOMIST: The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages

Companies today, Parris argued, have different priorities than the raw speed of chips.

FORBES: You Can Get A Chip Slower Than The New Sparc T5, You Just Have To Pay More

This is equally as important as raw speed, because heat and power consumption have a direct impact on performance and battery life.

FORBES

The raw speed of Ye's final 50-meter freestyle isn't unprecedented, either.

WSJ: Menu

Intel has spent years and billions of dollars convincing consumers that megahertz matters, and today PC buyers are trained to look for systems with higher speed processors--even if the raw clock speed of the chip isn't the primary driver of performance.

FORBES: Chief Executive Paul Otellini

Things like the number of computer instructions per clock cycle, the bandwidth of the RAM bus, and the overall efficiency of the architecture are at least as important as the raw clock speed at which a processor runs.

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The good news is that we've got every reason to believe the company recognizes the problem and is working to solve it -- but on a completely unrelated front, they're trying to speed up the process of fetching raw data off the interwebs, too.

ENGADGET: RIM patent app will have you barely browsing the web at incredible speeds

Using DDN's SFA12K-40 storage systems as the backbone for Spider II, this new file storage system is designed with 40 petabytes of raw capacity and is capable of ingesting, storing, processing and distributing research data at unprecedented speed.

ENGADGET: Titan supercomputer to be loaded with 'world's fastest' storage system