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mkehrt comments on Review of Kurzweil, 'The Singularity is Near' - Less Wrong
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Clock speed isn't the only measure of CPU performance. In fact, it isn't much of a measure at all, given that new processors are outperforming Pentium 4 chips (ca. 2005) by the factor you'd expect from Moore's law, despite the fact that their clock speeds are lower by as much as a half.
This isn't really true--clock performance is a really good metric for computing power. If your clock speed doubles, you get a 2x speedup in the amount of computation you can do without any algorithmic changes. If you instead increase chip complexity, e.g., with parallelism, you need to write new code to take advantage of it.
Wrong. A two-fold increase in CPU clock rate implies a twofold increase in CPU cycles per second, and nothing more. Any number of pure hardware improvements - for example, increasing the number of instructions, decreasing the number of CPU cycles an instruction takes to execute, improving I/O speed, etc - can improve performance without changing the clock rate, or even while decreasing the clock rate, without introducing parallel processing cores.