In the early nineties last century started the race 386 and 486 processors. Then it seemed very serious, but today it seems rather ridiculous. Something like that now exists in the sphere of mobile processors, but speed is not the only indicator of performance. Smartphone Nokia 500 processor running at 1 Ghz, but its performance is severely indicators of modern mobile chips with the same 1 GHz.
The problem is that even now, in mid-2011, Nokia still has not been a force to get rid of outdated ARM11 architecture.
For example, Apple moved to the architecture of ARM Cortex-A8 in 2009 when in Smartphone iPhone 3GS and new Apple A5 processor is manufactured on the basis of the Cortex-A9, and popular today mobile platform NVIDIA Tegra 2. Thus, popular today mobile chipsets for two generations ahead of processors used in Nokia products. It should be noted that the Finnish manufacturer has experience in the production of devices with Cortex-A8 processors, in particular, this N900 smartphones and N9. Complicates lack Nokia 500 dedicated graphics chip, so the difference in frequency compared with models N8, C7 and E7 is spent on handling graphics tasks. As processor performance ARM11 processor at 1 Ghz is equivalent to the performance of contemporary 400 MHz chip.